You and Me (and the Blood We've Spilled)
by HasFar2Go
Summary: New truths are exposed between Liz and Red. They handle the revelations accordingly. Slow burn Lizzington. AU Post 1x14 "Madeline Pratt"
1. Prologue

**You and Me (and the Blood We've Spilled)**

**A/N: Don't own a damn thing. I'm just borrowing characters and concepts for the time being but promise to return them soon(ish).**

**Rest assured, the prologue is a hell of a lot shorter than the chapters will be.**

* * *

**I**t's a stark scene she finds.

There's an industrial hum and an unwavering tick. The second part would be easy to confuse with the sound of a wristwatch if it weren't for the pool of red beneath the solitary chair on the bare concrete. The blue-blond light that shines through the gloomy windows is almost as anemic as Raymond Reddington, tied to the chair and bleeding out.

When Elizabeth decides to give up her hiding spot, the rubber treads of her thick soled boots scrape across leftover bits of debris on the concrete; the noise hisses and echoes in the vast space. With slight delay, the seated man's eyes open, finding her before him. He acknowledges her by pressing his lips together.

If he is surprised when he finds himself staring at the barrel of her gun, he does not show it.

His eyes slide shut in understanding - he can't nod.

She fires.

* * *

_**T**__he bang causes everyone to jump and then laugh nervously._

_Their professor's podium continues to rattle after he steps away, leans against the table, and when he moves to perch, Elizabeth Scott seated in the front row, two seats right from the center, cannot help but notice that his socks match in pattern but not color and that is hand is still violent red from the slap._

_She tries not to laugh, because it will make the next approximately 20 minutes hard to get through._

_There is chest puffing and a glance around the room to ensure he has their attention before he starts his story. There's always a story. Every class starts on the right track, but it derails and the students are left to listen to a former CIA man relive his glory days._

"_Half of the history of this country will never end up in your textbooks," he sighs and pauses for effect. "The steps that take place, the work we do everyday behind the scenes, in the shadows, for your continued security are incredible. _

"_Take for instance, the Gatz Project."_

_The class waits. If he is expecting any sort of comprehension - which is unrealistic, since he probably shouldn't be sharing this story right now - he'll have to keep waiting._

_Elizabeth's pen hovers over the edge of her notepad, trying to determine if the information they're about to hear is worth transcribing into the expansive notes she takes. _

_(It's a habit she'll carry with her into the future, when she'll do the same in the classroom parts of her time at Quantico. Writing it down makes it easier for her to recall later.) _

"_In the late eighties, we were successfully able to use a gradual propaganda campaign to embed American Intelligence officers with predeveloped histories within a number of criminal organizations. The project consulted heavily with a group of us," he takes a breath to chuckle and she wonders if he has director's notes in his mind, "_lowly_ psychologists to assist with the right steps to take." _

_The student to Elizabeth's left sighs, just loudly enough for her to hear, and taps his pencil against his notepad. '_Boring' _is scrawled in poor penmanship across the edge of the page. Elizabeth doesn't nod, but flashes him a small smile of acknowledgement because actually, this _could_ be an interesting topic if someone other than Bartsen was giving this information._

_It's important to try to fit in. She's more than earned her spot in this program, and she's not going to burn a bridge with a potential study partner over a difference of opinion._

_This is the sort of practicality her dad's hammered into her, and it's stuck._

_The class continues, but Elizabeth's mind is miles away. Her worries are focused on her dad and the fact that he hasn't checked in like he is supposed to. Promised to. Uncle Timmy had promised their fishing trip would be fine, but she worries, as she always does. _

_Her fingers run over the edge of her scar and she tries to focus on the man speaking in front of the group._


	2. To Carry the Weight of Unraveling

**To Carry the Weight of Unraveling**

**A/N: Still don't own a damn thing. Chapter title from Sarah Mclachlan's **_**Stupid.**_

* * *

**W**hen she's called in to work and finds out they're receiving a new assignment, Cooper must see the mild confusion on Liz's face, because he looks at her directly when he explains their newest target is not on Red's Blacklist, but he might as well be. Briefly, she remembers Red's ire the last time she intentionally took on another target.

"Chatter has confirmed that The Brigadier will be in our area tonight for a business transaction, and this opportunity may not present itself again," he elaborates.

A quick tap on the keyboard to her boss' left and the overhead screens are filled with the man's face. This was a man living an opulent life with one eye over his shoulder. Ike Morrison is Caucasian, grey-haired and brown-eyed with a sense of vitality to him. A person would be hard pressed to tell you this was a man who gave up an impeccable military career to become a criminal king.

"Sounds like someone we know," says Ressler, darkly. Meera makes a small noise that is somewhere between a grunt and a laugh.

Liz doesn't take part

Anger is no longer a gut reaction to the mention of Reddington's name. He frustrates the hell out of her, yes, but he also gave up his safety in a bulletproof box for her, and he's probably done a lot more for her she doesn't know about. The concept is disquieting but not reviling.

She refocuses on the screens, and after a second or two, and is able to connect the man with the image she saw on the overhead projector in her college days. A little younger then, a little less worn.

The crimes attributed to him were different then. The severity of some of the bullet points on the screen before her now have her stomach turning.

"We read about him in one of my criminology classes," she says out loud, "but they never mentioned anything about his involvement in the Buenos Aires '94 bombing."

She senses Meera standing up a little straighter beside her, just within her peripheral field of vision. She would turn to look at the CIA agent, but Cooper is looking at her.

"We don't share everything we know with the collegiate field, Keen."

Rebuked, she remains silent for the rest of the briefing. Liz notices Meera give the info on the screen a second glance before she turns to leave when they're dismissed.

For her, there isn't much to do. She's assigned to the surveillance truck so she can observe their target. Once he's brought in, she will spend time questioning him. If she cannot get info out of him (she hasn't even been told yet _what_ they want from him), they will bring in Meera, and the camera will be turned off, and they will ignore the screams.

To be honest, even her role in this assignment is foolish. Everyone knows she's there because of Raymond Reddington and his demands. Even the youngest team member at the Post Office probably has more related field experience than she does.

If they think she's going to tip off Red, since it's obvious he's being intentionally left out, they're wrong. Liz makes a point of being around the others and ensuring her phone is not in sight.. Knowing their criminal consultant, he will know about this; she just wants it painstakingly clear she's not who he's getting intel from.

In the past, this would be the time when Liz would call her husband to check in with him, tell him she was not going to be home for dinner, beg for his forgiveness, and then go back to work with guilt burning in her stomach.

Even on normal days, she doesn't even pull her phone out anymore.

The last thing she wants is for Red to be right about her husband, but her own continuing sense of distrust is what is keeping her from mending everything with her husband. There's a giant and expanding chasm between them filled with baby furniture that will probably never be used.

She doesn't mean to withdraw, not really. Tom is her _normal_, something she's never really had before he came into her life. She desperately wants to keep that. She wants to be wrong.

_And yet_...

"It's okay, Lizzie," Tom whispered into the dark the other evening, and his words carried over the cool sheets between them. "Couples go through rough spots. We're going to come out of this stronger, I know it."

She didn't feel comforted by his word, she felt like he was saying them to convince them both.

Shaking off the doldrums has gotten easier, at least. By the time they're ready to roll and get in position for the strike, her head is back in the game.

Their target is set to meet for a business transaction at a restaurant in National Harbor. The Gaylord is being used for some massive leadership convention, and the entire area is crawling with strangers who wouldn't recognize one of America's Most Wanted sitting at the table next to them at the Old Hickory Steakhouse.

She can almost _hear_ Red's comments about the place being too tacky or their poor wine selection.

The surveillance truck, parked fairly far away, is warm, and bears the unfortunate, residual smell of Doritos and bagged popcorn from previous stakeouts. Liz wishes she could crack open the back door and let in some of the cool November night air and the waterfront breeze, but knows that it should be over soon. This is a quick grab and go if they do everything by the book.

Not that they ever do.

Not that it ever works that way.

Beside her Carl Spencer, a more junior member of their team - a fresh-faced, former football quarterback-type who has spent his short time with them channeling Ressler levels of patriotism - leans back in his seat and cracks his back.

There is only a small burst of background buzz before Meera's voice comes through the old mic-and-headphone sets they've both been outfitted with - this is the secondary van, and it's outfitted with leftover tech that's seen better days. The CIA agent's voice is more confident than hers ever is in situations like this. "Target sighted approaching restaurant."

Elizabeth tenses and watches the screen displaying monitors inside the restaurant, waiting to see him in the lobby.

They seat The Brigadier in a back corner, where he chooses the chair facing the front entrance, with an emergency exit to his left. He doesn't appear to be armed, nor does he sit as if he is, but if he is anything like Red, he probably wouldn't need more than his fork to get out of this place if he was attacked.

"Any sign of his dinner date?" Ressler questions. Noise from the kitchen, where he is stationed, makes it hard to hear him. He receives a 'no' from another team member.

They wait.

Morrison waits.

Meera's voice starts to come through, but it's cut off. The static in the back lets Liz know she's still there, as does the visual she still has on the CIA agent, but something's caught the woman's attention and she raises her menu enough to block her face.

"Someone needs to replace me," she requests. "Someone he didn't see that day."

The comment is only cryptic for a moment.

The Brigadier's guest approaches the table and grips the man's hand with a strong handshake. The shape of the body, the face, and the clothes all match, but the mannerisms are so different from what she knows, she only truly accepts it's her husband when he laughs.

The only thing she actually knows about her husband is the way he laughs.

She seems to watch herself, disconnected and absent, push her seat back, tell Spencer she needs to recuse herself from this operation, and then waits, patiently, for that info to be relayed to Cooper. She's not looking at the screen, at her husband, or listening in. Spencer will be able to attest to the fact that within seconds of her husband coming into the restaurant, she removed herself as best she could.

Liz stares at the back doors and waits for them to open, focusing on the tiny spot where the light from the parking lot is sneaking in through a chip in the blackout paint. This is a shit van, she thinks absently. Her fingertips brush over her scar and she feels a wave of panic, hurt, and confusion start to rise and threaten to take her under. She's stuck here until the takedown now.

Spencer shifts in his seat, and the creak wakes her up enough to make her realize she lost time; a glance at her watch and she realizes she can't remember the last seven minutes.

Unfortunately, this isn't a foreign feeling. She still can't remember much of her travel to Nebraska after her father died, or her time there. The numbness is a familiar comfort.

Thinking of her father, however, reminds her of his effects sitting at home, in a house that Tom has access to. If they nab him along with The Brigadier, they're going to look through her house and those boxes. A sudden sense of urgency to protect those precious belongings wakes her up a little.

There is no way they will let her go home before they take her in for questioning - and if Tom gets away, it isn't even safe to go back. She has precious little time to secure those items.

"Fuck."

Liz can't stop herself, upon hearing Spencer's voice, her head snaps up and she looks at the screens and watches her husband leave the restaurant. There's an envelope in his hand.

If there had been a small part of her hoping this was a misunderstanding, it's gone.

The younger agent's eyes slide from the screens to glance at her. She sighs, puts her hands up, and realizes this is not mock surrender.

"I'm just waiting," she assures him, tiredly. "I know."

The Brigadier leaves the building and the apprehension goes smoothly. It's quick, so quick and easy it leaves Liz's hackles up.

Her phone buzzes, and she announces her intention to reach into her pocket to hand it to him before doing so. So far, Spencer is handling being stuck in the van with a potential mole very well. The phone sits on the counter between them, occasionally lighting up to show the unacknowledged text from Tom. To be honest, replying to a text might actually tip him off.

_Paul's truck died. Still in the parking lot at the school trying to help him. (Might take a while since neither of us knows what we're doing.) AAA on way but says it'll be a while. _

Paul is a second grade teacher. He was at their baby shower. He had a little too much to drink and nearly pissed in her broom closet when he confused it with the bathroom.

Paul is probably at home with his wife and kids and has no idea he's being used as a cover by her husband for his meeting with a wanted criminal.

Her eyes burn with unshed tears. Why does part of this feel like failure on her part? She's prided herself on being smart, at least she did before she ended up at the beck and call of a world class criminal. How could she miss the signs that Tom wasn't the man he pretended to be?

The back door opens and the person silhouetted against the streetlight is short with shoulder-length hair. Meera. She doesn't think she could handle Ressler right now; crying on him after the Stewmaker had left things awfully uncomfortable for a while between them.

"Agent Keen, if you could come with me, please," the other woman requests, her voice quiet, soft.

Liz takes a deep breath, pushes out of the chair, and walks awkwardly, bent slightly over, until she can step down and out. Immediately, she hands her coworker her firearm and informs her that her cell is in the van with Spencer, and he's had it since they sighted Tom.

She is proud of herself when her voice only breaks twice on the last part.

The red and blue lights from a patrol car blocking the street are blinding after she'd spent so long in the dark of the van. There's a SWAT team standing nearby, now finished with their work, and a few others from the Post Office, who don't make eye contact with her. At least they're keeping this discreet.

Meera's touch at her shoulder blade is deceptively gentle as she leads her to a sedan parked in the back of the parking lot, away from everyone else.. "It'll just be a minute. The sooner we get started, the sooner it's over."

"Sure," Liz manages to choke out. After she swallows again and feels like the burgeoning internal hysteria is at bay, she trusts herself enough to ask "Do you have anyone following him?"

Meera shakes her head subtly as she opens the back door of the car, and continues to look over it, avoiding Liz's eyes but radiating a quiet anger she knows well. "We were instructed to continue as planned and not tip him off."

"If you get my phone to Aram, he might be able to use it...track him maybe. He usually has it on. Tom, I mean."

Meera looks down at Liz at that. "We'll do what we can," she assures her. An SUV closer to the front of the parking lot turns its headlights on and the driver's window rolls down and Ressler's face appears. He waves the CIA agent over.

Liz's door is left ajar, and it's a blessing. Working quickly, she pulls out the cheap little burner phone stored in her boot, and whispering thanks out loud that it's already powered on, she dials a number she knows by heart with shaking fingers while slumping down in the seat. She has a limited opportunity to use the thing and get rid of it.

Over the last few months, Elizabeth Keen has decided to start being a little smarter about her own safety. The last thing she wants, in case things with Red go sideways, is for there to be a record of unreported, frequent calls to the man to and from her personal cell. If Red used burners phones, she'd reasoned, she would too. If anything, she had guessed, he'd take it as some strange compliment, with her mimicking him. He had seemed flattered by her sudden request to use the new number of the week; he had made a game of getting the number before she could supply it to him. In the grand scheme of shit hitting the fan in her life, his knowledge seemed trivial.

Clearly this foresight is about to pay off.

Hands shaking and her heart rate skyrocketing, Liz finds her field of vision focused on the door handle as she listens to the line ring and waits for him to pick up.

"Lizzie! Did you mi-"

"-It's Tom," she cuts him off, finding her voice jarringly rough to her own ears. He grows deadly silent on the other side of the phone save for the crackle of air passing in a rush. Whether it's a quick inhalation or a sigh, she cannot tell, and doesn't have the time to consider. "You were right."

"I am sorry Liz."

He even sounds like he means it, too.

"I nee-" she stops, finding the words difficult to say, stubbornly stuck in her throat even after she swallows. "The boxes with my Dad's things. It has to be quick."

There is only a brief second of hesitation as he translates what she's saying, understands what is inferred. A tiny bit of relief trickles through her when she realizes that all of their frustrating, cryptic half-conversations before tonight have prepared them for something like this.

When he speaks next, his voice is flat, deadly serious. "Anything else?"

"Birth certificates and passports are-"

"Same as Sam?" he interrupts her, and she hears a car door shutting on his end of the call. It seems like he will be handling her request personally. She'll consider what this is all costing her later, when it's safe to. There's a tiny thread of calm, just out of reach, and she internally reaches for it.

"Y-yeah."

"Just tell them the truth, Lizzie. You're going to be fine," Red assures her, voice dropping an octave, the gravel strangely soothing.

She ends the call, takes out the battery and grinds both parts under her boot heel. She throws most of the small fragments out of the car and into the shadows below the adjacent vehicle when she is certain no one is looking and the rest is pushed under the floor mat.

Before long, Meera returns to the car, and the two women are on I-295 northbound in silence. Liz looks out the window without seeing.

He knew. Red _knew_. All this time, he could have…

No, no that was wrong. He _did_ tell her the truth, but after Tom had been questioned and walked out of the Post Office a free man, she'd attributed all of it to Red and some sick attempt at breaking up her marriage to get closer to her.

She owes him an apology.

She will owe him quite a bit more after tonight. Trusting him with her father's belongings and those documents is a risk, but one she has to take.

Now that the decision is made, she thinks over the items in her house that she values...at the moment, they're all linked to Tom, and she'd rather start over.

Even the idea of going back to the house is filling her with dread. And anger. Anger at Tom's deception is starting to filter in, and Liz isn't entirely sure she isn't going to break something when she goes back.

She wants it all gone. Wiped clean. She doesn't want there to be anything left that will remind her of their relationship or the memories they created in that house, now that she sees it for what it is. The betrayal. The misplaced trust.

She's seen that kind of anger in action before - the remains of it at least. She had questioned, when the intel came in, why Raymond Reddington blew up his family home.

The suddenness of the connection makes her choke on a sob.


	3. Glow in the Darkness

**A/N: Sorry for the delay in posting! Chapter title taken from 'Stars' by Warpaint.**

**Still don't own any of this.**

**Warning: Brief mention of child abuse in this chapter.**

* * *

**H**ours go by.

It's difficult to say how many. The halogen light overhead is too bright, and it hums to show her that the world hasn't stopped, that this is all real, and she is currently at the Post Office in an interrogation room being asked to divulge the intimate details of her life to a man she does not know in an expensive but poorly tailored suit who did not even introduce himself. Liz sits hooked and strapped to wires that will say if she is going to spend her life in a jail cell or walk away with an insincere apology from higher ups for this experience.

There are small mercies, though. Meera is undoubtedly in another room, asking the Brigadier questions instead of sitting across from her.

The Post Office was empty when they came in - there was another operation taking place with a second team involving tech and some kind of recon. Liz remembers seeing Aram nervously strapping on a vest and knowing it was going to be a hard night for him. At least she knows that the beginning of her interrogation didn't have an audience.

"Agent Keen," the man on the other side of the table says - sighs really, and his tone falls in some middle ground between inconvenienced and accusatory. "Your blood pressure is excessively high. I'm going to have to ask you to try to calm down so we can continue."

She levels a glare at him, and bites back the initial two word response. "I'm sorry," she answers careful, and clearly isn't. "I just discovered the man I married is a criminal and everything I know about him can safely be assumed to be a lie. I have spent the last few hours telling you everything I thought I know about him, and realized that I have literally spent hours talking about my husband and know nothing about him. The last thing I would want right now is to inconvenience you, I assure you."

When they finally let her out, it's the middle of the next afternoon. Tom is probably aware they're on to him, she surmises as she stands for the first time and tries to get feeling back in her legs. She hasn't answered any of his messages, and he's probably escalated to calls. Right now she wants the quiet and dark of her office until she can make arrangements for a hotel room...not that she'll get rest there. She's going to have to now keep an eye out for her husband.

When she steps out into the hallway, she notices Ressler standing in the observation room across the way. Beyond the edge of his arm, she catches a glimpse of Meera beyond the one-way mirror.

Ressler spots her in the dimmed reflection, and turns to look at her. "Keen," he acknowledges as if it were any other day.

He says nothing about the last few hours, or Tom, and she finds herself relieved. Tiredly, she nods in lieu of a greeting and comes to stand beside him, leaning against the edge of the window frame.

"How long?"

"She's been at him since we got him in eleven hours ago and the guy hasn't said a word. Physical, emotional, whatever, he won't crack. He's given his name and verified he is aware he is wanted for a laundry list of crimes, but he won't give us any details….it really is like talking to Reddington."

Her coworker on the other side of the glass has her suit jacket off, and when she speaks, Liz can hear how rough her voice is from overuse.

"Mr. Morrison, if you don't talk to me, there are others who will come in, and they will get answers out of you, and their methods are far more brutal than mine. Do you understand?"

There's something usually very calming about Meera's voice, but right now, there is a hard edge of ice beneath the civility.

Ike Morrison nods. He leans back in his chair, inhaling deep and easy and unlike a man whose lip is split or sporting a swollen eye. If it weren't for the brutality of his face, it would be easy to mistake him for a man watching a baseball game or sitting on his porch. "I am aware of the process, Agent Malik. You will threaten, as you have been doing, and hurt, as you have - and well, I might add. And I will tell you this now: it will not matter."

Meera stands, slowly with a sigh, and collects her blazer before turning to go. She's giving him time. Time to answer her.

He responds, but he doesn't answer.

"Do you know what happens when Uncle Sam wants you?" The question is posed casually, conversationally. The CIA agent pauses and turns to look at him.

Morrison inspects his hands.

"What happens when you're blinded by some sense of God-ordained moral high ground and all that red, white, and blue? When he wants you to give him everything? He takes everything from you. Everything. He tells you to act like a monster and you become one. You have to, not because it's easy, but because it's the only thing you can do."

He pauses, for a moment, to smile at Meera. The gesture is thin-lipped, and intended to appear pleasant.

It would be, if it weren't for the contempt boiling beneath the surface of his tone - Liz can thank her time with Red for being able to identify it.

"Beat me, threaten me. _ It doesn't matter._ You might as well shoot me now, Agent, because there is nothing you can take from me but my life at this point."

Liz can't help it, she inhales sharply and takes a step back, and has to take a few more to keep her balance.

Ressler is still staring at the Brigadier, but she sees the way he holds his jaw - the man's words have gotten to him. Even if it's just a little, that is significant with someone like him.

"Go get some rest, Keen," he barks, to keep her from asking anything.

She mutters a farewell and puts one foot in front of another until she makes it to her office and falls into her chair. Despite sitting for hours, she's exhausted and wants to crawl into a bed as quickly as she can. Her eyes close and they seem to burn, but it's better.

A night of sleep - strike that, an hour or two of solid sleep if that's all she can get and she's thinking that's going to happen- and she can process everything that's happened: Tom, the implications of what might have taken place to cause Red to be who he is now, and a billion other things. A little quiet and she can start trying to piece together the puzzle before her.

But she can't get to that point if she's doesn't start moving.

With a bit of a dramatic sigh (she'll admit it), she opens her eyes and sits properly in the chair.

The white printout on her desk grabs her attention. It's a confirmation for room at a four star hotel in Crystal City. There isn't a checkout date.

This must be their form of apology...and a way to keep her from making contact with her husband if they were wrong.

There's a knock at the door and she looks up to see Cooper standing in the doorway.

"Thank you, sir," she says, getting the obligatory response over with.

"You'll have a security detail until we apprehend him, and we have the house under surveillance. This won't take long, Agent Keen."

"I appreciate it, sir."

The A.D. smiles at her, warmly. "We take care of our own," he explains simply. "Reddington has been quiet for a while, I expect he'll be contacting you shortly, and we'll need you at your best."

He ushers her to a meeting room to wait for the security detail to arrive and pick her up, which luckily does not take long. Introductions are made quickly, and she excuses herself to retrieve the duffel with a change of clothes she keeps stowed under her desk.

"Agent Keen!"

Liz spots Aram jogging to catch her; the gangly tech has a manilla folder in his hands, thrust before him like a relay baton.

He's in one piece, but he looks a little pale, and there's a beady, nervous look to him.

"How did-"

He shakes his head, breathless. "Not important," he cuts her off. "This is, I just...I wanted to get these to you before you go."

A quick flip through the pages contained within the folder reveals information on starting the name change process for D.C. residents, as well as some hand scribbled pages ripped from a green-yellow steno pad scrawled with what appear to be lawyers names, numbers, and addresses.

The yellow post-it note on the steno pad sheet almost goes unnoticed. She really needs sleep if her eyesight has gotten to be this poor.

_Friday Mall 5:30p_

Liz frowns and continues to stare at the note until a tan hand pushes the folder closed.

"Remember the thing with the phones?" he prods, dropping his voice while sticking his hands into his pockets and looking over her head at one of the screens. "It's...it's like that. But not."

It's another entry on her to do list, post sleep.

She thanks him for the paperwork, for saving her some time (because the man actually _did_ help her out in the process of trying to set up this clandestine meeting), hopes she's conveying her understanding somehow, and finds the group of agents assigned to babysit her for the time being so they can get on the road.

The drive is quick, and after reviewing a few instructions with the team, she sinks down onto a mattress she'd typically find to be too soft and thinks it's heaven. There's a spare shirt and drawstring shorts in the duffel to change into for sleep, but that would require effort and movement.

And then she remembers the shirt is one of Tom's and she's pushing herself off of the bed and advancing on the bag to remove the offensive article. She'll settle for putting it in the bottom of the trashcan in the bathroom where she can't see it.

That's when she notices the burner phone that's been tucked into the duffel bag.

"Son of a bitch," Liz breathes, her search-and-destroy mission momentarily forgotten as she inspects the phone that has seemed to magically appear in her belongings. Red must have stowed it there a while ago. Her own cell is currently back with Aram and the rest of the tech team. They've given her a loaner for now, with all of her contacts and info, but she's assuming it's tapped, like the room.

Strangely, knowing she has a way to contact Red feels like another measure of precaution.

Since she's up, she switches into the shorts and just keeps her shirt from the day - well, the day before - for sleep. Tom's shirt is pushed into the bottom of the bathroom trashcan, and she wads several fistfuls of toilet paper to cover it, for good measure. Her bra gets stuffed back in the duffel bag.

Even as she crawls under the sheets, she feels the odd buzz of adrenaline, and knows she might not get any sleep tonight. Her body has already been awake for too long, and is still in 'hail mary mode', typically sustainable for a good 48 hours with sporadic coffee intake and bits of food. It's not conducive for the sleep she wants - needs really, since she has a feeling the next few days are going to be hell.

For safety purposes on this first night, she's keeping the loaner phone on her bedside dresser, right next to the Glock she's been issued. Even with the lights off, the red power light from the television reflects off the firearm and she finds herself staring at it.

After a second of deliberation, she decides to put it under the pillow on the other side of the bed. Time with Red is most definitely rubbing off with her because she finds symbolism in the move.

Speaking of the devil, she knows she should thank him and ensure he's not sending in some private SWAT team to get her.

With a groan, Liz throws back the covers, picks up the burner phone, and heads for the bathroom. A quick twist of the taps and she's got the water running.

The phone vibrates, causing her to jump, before she has a chance to even look at it to dial his number.

Gratitude is being replaced quickly by suspicion, and then anger in short order after that.

"Tell me you have a camera in here and you're a dead man."

"Succeed with that threat and you'd better make it worthwhile and collect on the reward, sweetheart." Red doesn't even sound the slightest bit perturbed by her threat, and she wonders how he doesn't take it seriously after she stabbed him with a pen.

The bastard is unflappable.

He continues speaking in an upbeat manner. "I can assure you I haven't put any surveillance equipment in that hotel room...your friends at the FBI, however, they're a different matter."

There's a pause, and neither says anything.

"You picked up on the first ring," he reminds her, but doesn't accuse, and she closes her eyes and sinks onto the edge of the tub.

With a sigh, she concedes and admits "I was going to call to thank you...for helping."

"You know, Lizzie, this room is only on the other side of the wall and isn't bugged, if you'd like to have this conversation in person."

She hangs up, curses, and makes quick work of retrieving and sliding her bra back on before grabbing the remote and turning on the tv. With the sound slightly raised to mask the noise, she moves to the adjoining room's door and swings both locks open. When she pulls the door open, she finds the other door is already ajar.

Dembe is nowhere in sight; it's just Red, sitting against the headboard on the king-size bed still fully dressed save for a suit jacket laid neatly beside him beneath his ever-present hat, legs crossed at the ankles before him. He gives her a pleasant smile as she shuts the door, and ignoring the look of exhausted bewilderment on her face, raises his tumbler of amber liquid at her in greeting.

"When I'm actually awake, I'm going to start figuring out how you pulled this off," she declares, crossing to stand at the foot of the bed.

He takes a sip, watching her over the rim of his glass with unconcealed amusement, and grins broadly after he swallows. "The Feds still fill out paperwork when making middle of the night reservations for three hotel rooms within a commutable distance of DC. You just have to know whose office to bug."

He's being kind because he's trying to make it easy for her to thank him for his assistance, and she knows that. He's revealed his presence to her because he knows the last 30 hours have been trying - might even think this is a way to get her to side with him by showing more transparency than her husband or her employer. He has the room beside hers because…

She can't figure that part out now.

"I appreciate what you did," she tells him, and finds herself touching at her scar as she makes an effort to maintain eye contact with him. "With everything going on, I didn't have to worry about them finding anything about my dad, and that was...a relief. I appreciate your loyalty to him."

There's a small muscle tick below one of his eyes - he's processing something. Something she just said wasn't expected, and she wishes she knew what it was. Small triumph must show on her own face because Red places the glass tumbler down, rises from the bed in a smooth series of movements, and walks towards her - predatory in some ways. Of course, she thinks, he needs to gain back whatever control it was he thinks he lost by letting her see his surprise.

She doesn't budge.

He gestures to the credenza below the television, behind her, and she twists and sees the small white envelope sitting in stark contrast on the dark wood.

"The boxes are sealed and being kept at a storage place in Bethesda. The owner is an associate - the location is secure and discrete. The key and the password inside the envelope are all you need. Let me know when you want the address."

She feels a little more at ease with the key in her hand.

"Thank you," she says, running a finger over the hard edge of the little envelope.

His next words are simple, matter-of-fact.

"You need to know, Sam loved you from the moment he saw you."

Liz all at once wants to strike him, and embrace him, and tell him to stop. She settles for stepping away from him.

"Is that supposed to help me, telling me that?" she asks. She manages to sharpen the edges of the question with some of the hostility she needs to distance herself emotionally. "With everything going on right now, is that supposed to help me - comfort me? What, my husband is a criminal, but at least the man who took me in loved me?"

He's quick to answer, almost cutting her off with a bitter tone. "I am the last man who deserves to comfort you, Lizzie, but I know right now you are looking for some certainty. If there is anything I know about Sam, it is this: the man saw you, saw the situation you were in, and was willing to give everything up-"

"-What do you mean 'situation'?"

He's hovering, eyebrow rising, his mouth tasting and trying different words, different facets of the truth - she knows they aren't lies, now, after what's happened with Tom. It doesn't make it any better that it's never the full truth.

"Red." His nickname comes out harsh and desperate. A plea.

He blinks, his eyes on her steady, and his face is emotionless. "I can't tell you it all, Liz. There are things that you need to find out in your own time. When this is over, I don't want you to feel I misled you in any way."

Is that why he stopped trying to convince her of Tom's guilt? She accused Red of manipulating the situation, of placing blame. Told him to go to hell. This thing, whatever it is, went back even further, is even more important. To Red, the risks must be greater.

The woman bites her lip watches him to see if there is a way to make him change his mind, any sort of tell, any kind of weakness.

She doesn't find one.

Liz feels her own shoulders slump, and when she blinks, the motion is slow. "Would you tell me what you can?"

Red gestures to the chairs by the window, on opposite sides of a small wooden table and they face one another, one dressed impeccably, and the other a half-awake, bedraggled mess in sleep clothes.

The man takes his time sitting, clearly gathering his thoughts, and after putting the key on the table Liz sits back in her chair, trying to appear much more at ease than her body, seeming to hum with anticipation, feels. This is something for her to latch onto instead of worrying about Tom, she knows, and it's a gift that Red is trying to give her in a way. A distraction.

"Sam and I, we go back to the start together," he pauses, and licks his lips, and she waits, motionless as he finds the words. "Your birth parents were...they were not the sort of people who took to parenting well. Your mother was consumed by her own hobbies, and your father was…"

Red exhales heavily and leans over the table. His brows are knit when he focuses on his hands, fingers interlocked on the glossy enamel surface. "You were too young to have the injuries you had. And too thin. Sam noticed first, knew the signs from his own previous experience, and could not abide to see you continue on in the life you were in.

"He asked me to help him...he was like my older brother." Red's voice is tight, and before Liz thinks about it, she's leaning forward, covering his hands with one of hers.

The fact that he's talking about her seems secondary; she has no sense of ownership over this history he's relating to her now. It's alien, entirely removed from her.

Her childhood, what she remembers of it, was a happy one. Abuse was never part of that.

"So I helped him disappear with you," he finally says after swallowing twice, and trying to continue unsuccessfully once. "He cried on the phone that night. Said carrying you was like holding a bird, you were so thin."

Her weight was always a concern for her Dad, which she found strange since he always called her Butterball..._that's_ why he called her Butterball. The nickname both she loved and hated stemmed from this. Her free hand covers her mouth as the tears come and her gut clenches with grief.

When she can see through the tears, she sees Raymond Reddington's head is bowed, as if at confession.

"I am so sorry for everything, Lizzie. I am."

She shakes her head frantically, words unable to slip their way out of lips frozen in a grimace of emotional pain externalized, and settles for squeezing his hands.

She isn't sure how much time passes. Her tears fall and Red stares at their hands, swallowing and blinking, breathing unsteady.

Finally, she can talk again.

"_I'm_ the one who should be apologizing. You told me about Tom and I...I didn't want it to be true."

There's a flicker of something before he responds. "You had no reason to believe me."

Liz shakes her head again. "No, no looking back now there were so many things...bringing him in was something he must have prepared for."

"I have sources that tell me they do."

They. More than one.

Both Liz and Red are emotionally vulnerable right now, so she decides to push her luck and test her potential revelation from the car ride.

"Your wife," is all she gets out and she knows that she's made the proper connection. The hands in her grip spasm, barely perceptible, and he can't conceal the sharp quick whistle of air over his teeth, a hiss he tries to cut short.

No one ever mentions his wife. They've overlooked her in the files, and Ressler has expressed frustration in the futility of trying to find the wife and daughter, deeming them lost deep in Witness Protection.

"_You act like we're the same," _she'd accused Red, months before.

Had she and Tom adopted a child together, Tom could have used that child against her, and she can picture what would happen: she would have done whatever it took for that child.

In that hypothetical situation, she would burn the world down.

"Ask it," he dares her. Whatever was soft in his gaze before is hardening, and she regrets bringing this up now. In his shoes, she'd be angry as well.

Liz proceeds only slightly unsteady. "Was she...was she the reason you-"

"The reason I turned my back on our country?" he finishes for her, knowingly, words acidic. Red shifts, sits back in his chair, and their point of contact is lost. He gives her a sphinx-like smile, and she's reminded of their first meeting and how blind she felt then. She's reminded of the Brigadier, only a few hours ago. "Yes and no."

He's trying to throw her, which is baffling. This is the same man who warned her about her husband, told her what a mistake it would be to adopt a child...

"And your daughter?"

His lips part but there's a half second delay, and she knows, disappointment sliding over her, that she's going to receive another half-truth from him and she's too tired to fight for the rest of it.

He says simply "We both have truths we need to focus on discovering for ourselves."

Liz nods. The conversation is clearly at its end. She's afraid she'll do damage if she stays.

She plucks the white envelope off of the table as she rises to leave, and her movement is mirrored by Red, who then follows her to the door.

"Thank you for your honesty tonight," Liz says quietly, feeling it's a feeble token of gratitude now.

He raises an eyebrow. "I could be lying," he reminds her.

She shakes her head, slowly, and can't help the sad, wry pull on her lips. "But you weren't."

The Concierge of Crime evenly bids her goodnight.

(Neither one sleeps well.)


	4. Is This the Way My Mind Works

**A/N: Event planning at work totally screwed up my schedule this week. Sorry for the delay!**

**Chapter title from 'Two Small Deaths' by Wye Oak.**

* * *

**E**arly November paints the Capitol with a gray pallor and the residents and guests retreat into layers of down and wool. The Mall, unsheltered and exposed, does allow the sun to warm Liz as she nestles into her coat; she tries to appear casual during her attempt to blend in while she walks near a crowd of young students. From the disaffected expressions on their faces, she imagines they go to school nearby, and this isn't their first visit.

She remembers her excitement upon initially moving to DC. Now she doesn't think of its political or historical significance, just the damn traffic those aspects of its personality cause her to do battle with when she's on her drive home.

Not that she needs to worry about sharing a car anymore.

Liz is saved from from that sudden line of thinking when she spots Aram seated on a bench by the trees. She takes a seat close to him.

"What was wrong with the last spot?" he asks her, indignant, as he looks at the Reflecting Pool.

She keeps the daggered glare in his direction in check - the steps of the Lincoln Memorial might look dramatic in movies or television but they're not an ideal place during lunch break to carry out a discreet conversation with a fellow coworker whose implied going against their superiors' orders. She'd texted him to move locations and then she'd meet him.

"I've got a surveillance team until they catch Tom," she reminds him, and because sitting still like this is bothering her, adds "Walk with me."

They time it so they're on the tail end of what looks like a European tourist group. The group is slow moving as they all take photos and then review them on their cameras and she hears bits of Italian. Aram and Liz keep themselves back by a few paces.

"What is it?" she asks, when it seems the NSA tech isn't going to explain this meeting without prompting.

He's quick to utter out an apology. "Sorry! Sorry, I just...I just realized this is like something out of a movie and this might be the second time in my entire career this has been close to what I imagined when I started."

The first being the Garrick's takeover of the Post Office.

"You doing okay?"

He shakes his head, not discomfited by her accurate prediction of the direction of his thoughts. "No," he says with a little bit of a bitter laugh. "But are any of us? That whole thing, and everything after. It got me thinking about things a little differently."

He sighs, and runs a hand through his hair, and top of his head looks as ruffled as he seems to be internally.

He drops the volume of his voice so low she can barely hear him. Were anyone listening in, their mics would probably pick up the wind and nothing else. "That...that _thing_ we were doing? While you were uh, getting that person? Well, our thing was a second part of that.

"Someone was combing through the previous blacklist sites list and found a few in non-digital archives. I think it was still the ripple effect from your work finding Mr. R when we lost him."

"Order from above was to get to the place and transfer the database that was still there to some NSA servers. We're talking two decades' old stuff. Totally obsolete, but there were people that wanted it and for us to destroy the servers once we transferred it."

"You made a copy," she concludes, remembering his squirrely behavior that last time he'd done something similar, with surveillance footage and phone records. "What did you find?"

"Here's the thing, Liz," Aram declares, and his earnestness tone causes her to look up at him. He must see the silent chiding in her expression because he lowers his voice again.

"Our job? It's all I've got..._literally._ I never finished school. They contacted me and told me I was just wasting potential while I did my time for a handshake and piece of paper with a gold sticker on it. If I were to lose this, I've got a 14 year gap between the time I dropped out of college and now. Mr. R took the time to find out I wasn't involved, and he made sure I was cleared of suspicion. Having me hand over the papers to our boss? It made me seem important to him. Not _you_ levels of important, but someone useful. The guy protected me when it wasn't in his best interest."

A straggling middle schooler sprints between them in the opposite direction to catch up with his group and they are forced to jerk apart for a few steps.

"The point is, I know other people would have left him behind in the ambulance and called it a day, claimed they lost him. You did what you could to get him back."

Not that it was much good, but Liz sees the point he's making. Her actions made her concern for Red's safety clear.

"He's an important-"

Aram waves off her attempted excuse. "You know why I'm coming to you with this and not Captain America or Meera and it's not just because they scare me."

They've reached the part of the path where it curves to wrap around to the Atlantic Pavilion entrance and are immediately in a throng of people. Quickly, they maneuver around them, through the Pacific Pavilion, starting their walk in along the other side of the Pool.

"Is he in trouble?"

"I don't know," Aram admits. "But the scan was going fine when I saw Mr. R's name in the files - when you scroll really fast through something, do your eyes ever pick up on words for no real reason? It was like that. The thing is, those files existed from _before_ any timeline I've ever seen regarding his criminal history, so why was he in them?"

"I don't know much about his past that you don't Aram. You know Cooper's got my clearance blocked." She bites her lip and looks past him and over the park. He seems to vibrate with anxiety.

"What do you need?" she finally asks.

"I loaded everything to a remote server of my own, but I masked the transfers pretty well so I don't think anyone would catch it. My friend owns an internet cafe at a beach town in Delaware and let me set some of my own stuff up in a backroom there; I store my uh...my extracurricular stuff on that server."

When he catches the expression on her face, he says, a little more loudly than necessary. "Not _porn,_ Jesus!" He leans down and quietly hisses. "Just..If I can transfer it back locally, safely, would you look at it? See if it makes any sense?"

She stares at him and considers him. There isn't a single instant she can recall where she's doubted his sincerity or sensed an ulterior motive. His concern for Red is genuine, and she realizes the criminal has gained the loyalty of another person at the P.O. (although she takes issue with the method - fear).

Her curiosity is already captured. She wants to see this info for herself.

"I can't make any promises while I have this detail following me, but...yes. Tell me when and I'll look it over."

They separate, and Liz tries to melt back into lunchtime traffic.

She receives a mild dressing down from Cooper, but she explains she must have lost the agent assigned to her on the Metro and didn't have his number and it all gets settled. She won't go anywhere near Aram for fear the tech will give away something.

When the work day is finished (another day where the Brigadier refuses to give them info; he seems to wait for something or someone), she's escorted back to the van.

Liz requests to stop by her house to pick up some clothing and Cooper approves. She's stuck in the hotel for now and she overheard talk of moving her to another location; having her own clothing is a little bit of control back in her day.

When they pull up to the curb in front of her house, she's told to stay in the van while they do a search of the house - the surveillance team in place since the other night has already reported in that perimeter has been untouched.

Five minutes and she's allowed in.

Stepping back into the house for the first time in over 48 hours isn't unusual; she's spent plenty of nights either at work or on the road for work. Coming home to an empty house is new - well, it was new within the last few months. Knowing her husband is certainly not waiting for her makes the house feel brittle, too bright, and empty.

"I'll only be a few minutes," she assures the agent by the front door - Greta. She knows her first name is Greta but that's about it.

Greta nods. "Take your time," she tells her, but it's rehearsed and insincere.

Liz goes for the clothing she has hung up and ironed, already paired for anticipated hectic days. Throwing those suits in a suitcase for the transfer to her hotel room will only require minimal pressing when she takes them back out. With extra time stuck at the hotel, she might use the gym for the first time in months. She finds a few articles of gym clothing wadded up in the back of a drawer and tosses them on the bed.

The back door clicks. There's a loud _thump_ downstairs and what sounds like a grunt and Liz feels herself drawing her gun before she can process it. Her heartbeat is immediately throbbing in her ears and she tries to control her breathing so she can listen.

She dials the Post Office line and barely starts to whisper her call in info when there's gunfire downstairs by the front door. Greta gives a yelp and glass breaks. The intruder - it has to be Tom - must still be down there. She can get a few rounds in from the top of the stairs if she moves _now_.

Liz barely clears the door before Tom is tackling her to the floor. She calculated it wrong or he's faster than she thought. Inertia has her falling backwards, and the impact with the wall and then floor, while predicted in the previous split second, yanks the breath from her lungs. The gun is still in her grip but Tom's working on getting it out of her hands. The knee she tries to drive upward is squeezed between his and useless.

There's nothing but heavy breathing and scraping of broken glass and wood - in a removed sort of way, she realizes she took down a couple of the photos on the wall when she fell. Tom's breath hits her face and his face is close but his eyes _his eyes his fucking eyes_ are so emotionless and he's not wearing glasses and she tries to tell herself to focus, damn it.

He presses on her hand in just the right way and the gun drops the two or three inches out of her flailing grasp to the floor.

Her husband pushes it out of the way and keeps her other hand pinned down. He doesn't have a weapon of his own, but if he wants to, he'll be able to hold both her hands with one of his and do damage, probably choke her.. .

Potential defeat makes her cry out in frustration, but now that her hand is free and she is trying to keep it from being captured, she twists it and grabs at some of the broken glass, smacks him in the side of the face, and presses in.

Tom yelps in surprise and pain, and she bucks her hips on an angle while continuing to push the glass into his cheek until she can half push him off and half wriggle out from under him. She makes it onto all fours while reaching for the gun before he reorients himself and grabs at her ankle. Her fingers scrabble across the hardwood floor to reach the weapon but feels hope start to sink in her gut when he gives a yank and she slides backwards and the floor rushes up to meet her.

Self-preservation has her turn her head to the side to keep her nose from breaking, and Liz is very aware of the glass now embedded by her cheekbone. Undaunted, she continues to try to reach for the gun.

"Knock it off, Lizzie!" Tom growls through gritted teeth and it's the use of her nickname, so precious, that draws a surge of fury in her. She flexes the leg not in his grasp and drives the heel of her shoe into the underside of his jaw and immediately pulls herself on her elbows to the gun.

Footsteps squeaking and pounding on the first two steps - she can't wait to see who it is. Cool metal touches her fingertips and she's already rolling to point the gun at Tom.

Elizabeth Keen doesn't hesitate when she pulls the trigger - she's got near-perfect aim and tags her husband in the right shoulder.

She hears "Agent lower your gun!" barked at her seconds before one of the men from surveillance pushes Tom onto his stomach to cuff him, ignoring his grunt of pain when they move his right arm. Curley, one of the other men from surveillance, sidles around Tom and the agent to help her up off the floor. He grimaces when he sees the state of her hand.

Six minutes. That's the time between the first gunshot inside being heard and the guys from the surveillance van hitting the upstairs landing. Six minutes.

By the time she gets outside, Tom is being put in the back of a van and they're carting him off to the P.O. for questioning - they'll bring a medic in to look him over there, since they're last injured criminal escaped from the hospital he was taken to. One of the agents from her security detail is leaving in the back of the ambulance and the other two wait inside for body bags.

They try to corral her over to the rig for her assessment, and she asks for them to move it inside the house, but then she realizes her entire fucking pretense of a home is a crime scene and gives up her argument.

It's not like the neighbors all watching the spectacle are going to be her neighbors for very long after this.

The cuts on her face are ruled abrasions and quickly bandaged, although her hand requires more time. She sits on the lip of the rig and they start the process of removing the glass embedded in her palm.

A black luxury sedan comes flying down the street running lights; the siren's wail that bounces off of the row homes of Twelfth Street is slightly off key and beat from what the team is using. Heads turn and everyone watches, tense, to see who is getting out of the car.

It's Red, and it looks like he's _seeing_ red. Liz knows he'd go straight for her before he even clears the other side of the car. He seems to take up more space than normal and commands attention and she thinks this must be what he looked like back in the day, in uniform.

Frustration bubbles up in her. Raymond Reddington is still mostly an unknown to her, but he always seems to know what to say to get her walls to crumble, and she can't afford that right now. So she feels her spine straighten, and she tries to grab hold of that simmering anger for Tom and throw it at Red.

She'll start with the misappropriated siren. "Where the hell did you get a-"

He glares at her. _Glares._ It's a look filled with impatience and dark anger and Liz feels the question die in her throat unfinished. "Can you give us a second?" she asks the EMT who is trying to inch himself away from the newcomer now crowding them and the man seems all to happy to comply.

Red comes to stand with barely an inch between his torso and the outside of her thigh.

"Where are they?" Red asks, words rapid and emotionless. "Where is your security detail?"

"Dead or en route to the hospital. They had no way of-"

"-I'm not particularly interested in you defending these incompetent idiots, Elizabeth. Cooper has n-"

"-_Reddington_," she snaps, cutting him off, and she knows her voice is shrill and a little indignant, and she doesn't give a shit. If he's not going to tell her why he feels a need to keep her protected, or even more importantly, why he should have a right to act this way, she sure as hell isn't going to allow his theatrics to play out in this public venue, with who only knows watching.

The rebuke serves its purpose. His lips are parted, and he seems to be looking for something to say and coming up empty handed - she wishes she could capture this moment on film for posterity.

He moves on to his next task; man's gaze softens as he seems to survey her for injuries. When his glance slides over her cheekbone, she notices his hand twitch in her peripheral vision.

It nearly makes her regret her harsh bark and its entire unspoken command. Even if she doesn't understand the _why_, she knows now: when she speaks, he's going to listen to her and try to give her what she wants and needs. Even before giving up the safety of the box, he'd given up his own safety to turn himself in and start whatever this is.

She's going to find out why, she will in time, but knowing she holds that power over a man like him is enough to handle for now. Strangely, she doesn't want to make his weakness seem obvious to others - well, anymore than it already is. She wants to protect him, and he is discontented right now with failing to do the same for her.

This knowledge sits strangely on her shoulders and in her gut.

His eyelids slide shut slowly when she tries to give him an apologetic look for the chastisement, and she sees his nostrils flare for a brief second before some of the tension bleeds from his frame.

"Are you going back to work?" he ask with an ease that is well-rehearsed. Liz stares openly at him for a moment before answering.

Do the others see this? Can they see the character that is Raymond Reddington, or are they too focused on his reputation to even notice.

"Y-yeah. Yes. I'll need to tell them what happened. Give my account."

His head dips in acknowledgement of her words, and he sways and turns to inspect the front of her house, focusing his eyes on the building even while he seems to still be paying attention to her.

He'd give her the ride back, she knows. He'd go in, thunderous, and lambast Cooper. If nothing else it would just confirm once more she can be used against him as needed.

She'll turn down his offer and hopefully sound indignant and cross when she does so.

She has no idea where she'll sleep next, but it won't be in her bed in this house, and it won't be in the same hotel room. Call it paranoia, she doesn't care, she's requesting a hotel and room change and for it to be done off of the books, paperwork skipped.

She can't make it too easy for Red to find her later, after all.


	5. A Train to Train-Wreck Town

**A/N: Sorry for delay! This fic is now AU post 1x14 "Madeline Pratt". Keep in mind I still don't own a damn thing.**

**Chapter title from "What's a Girl to Do?" by Bat for Lashes**

* * *

**H**ours go by.

It's difficult to say how many. The halogen light overhead is too bright, and it hums to show her that the world hasn't stopped, that this is all real, and she is currently at the Post Office in what might as well be an interrogation room while she goes over the course of events that just took place in her house. Her husband is the one, this time, hooked and strapped to wires someplace in the building she's not permitted to see, but it's already absolutely certain he will be spending a great deal of time behind bars after this.

The team has found a lot of damning evidence regarding his involvement in a dozen deaths within the last two years - some ruled accidents, others blamed on other people. A few are open cases and there's pressure to get him to admit his guilt.

Several of the cases were already dates and times she'd questioned him about in their house, and Meera had asked him about.

Cooper is scant to be seen.

Her earlier decision to change hotel rooms still stands, and she hasn't ruled out the theory that someone else could be working with Tom, and they could still be looking for her - why, she's not sure. She imagines it's got something to do with Red, or something Red knows, but honestly that's all part of the bigger puzzle and she can't even inspect those pieces right now.

She wants to, though. In particular the pieces sitting on a server in Delaware, but she's stuck taking baby steps for the time being.

Liz stares at her computer screen and figures she has done a reasonably adequate job of translating six minutes of rage and terror into four pages of second-by-second clinical Fed-speak in her write up and determines it's time to call it a night.

Day. Afternoon. Whatever it is.

She's aware of the throbbing in her face beneath butterfly bandages and in her thickly wrapped hand and scrounges through her desk drawer for the jumbo storebrand ibuprofen bottle she'd stowed in there when she started working here.

The Post Office doctor is a diminutive owl of a man who spends his time in the small medical area one floor up. He gave her another looking over and determined sutures weren't prudent for the hand injuries. After telling her to stick to ibuprofen for pain, he hesitated for a second, looked at her with pity magnified by his large glasses, and then went over to the pyxis system and dispensed several nights' worth of sleeping pills.

She is bound and determined not to use them. She's going to be sleeping with one eye open for the time being.

There's a knock on the door and Meera's 'polite coworker smile' greets her and it's a welcome change from the condoling looks she's been getting...when she's not being watched with suspicious eyes by those in the P.O. who question her innocence.

She gave her husband a makeover with the collateral damage of their sudden hallway redecorating plans and a bad shoulder that will let him know when it's going to rain. She doesn't want pity and she is losing her patience with the mistrust.

"I'm breaking for lunch," Agent Malik announces. "Care to join me? My daughter had a party at Chuck E Cheese's last weekend and I've needed a real slice of pizza to get the taste out of my mouth since. I already cleared it with Cooper and we'll have security detail."

Liz's dubious faith must show, because Meera adds, "You'll be with me and I'm armed."

She trusts Meera a hell of a lot more than a group of green or greying agents eating McDonalds in the back of a van.

"Pizza sounds great," she replies, and locks her computer. "Anything sounds great right now; I can't remember the last time I ate."

The flash of concern in her coworker's eyes is quick and quickly covered. "Come on, I'm willing to do battle with the pre-Thanksgiving shoppers and the lunch crowd at Amy's if you are."

Liz laughs and it feels a little novel. "You must be pretty serious about this, then."

She grabs her purse and the heavy weight of metal at the bottom of it is actually a comfort.

"Make a point of raising your shoulder a bit; you can tell you're carrying," the CIA agent suggests and Liz thanks her as they walk out of her office.

Liz isn't very good at small talk; she can manage it when it comes to interactions for profiling, but in actual social situations, she always fumbles. So she sticks to something she knows very well: food (eating it at least).

"Next time we're in New York for a case, we have got to get you to a _real_ pizza place. It's just not the same here," she declares as they head to the elevator.

Meera goes along with it. While the elevator doors open, she asks "Everyone says that but is there really a difference?"

"Yes there definitely is, Agent Malik."

Red and Dembe, who is armed and looking tense, are standing before them in the delipidated old lift. With grace but a little force, their criminal consultant takes Liz by the arm and turns her around, leading her towards the back staircase. Meera voices protest at his actions, just as Liz does, but Red ignores them both and continues explaining "It's got something to do with the mineral deposits in the water, actually. Fascinating stuff, but we're going to have to cut this conversation short."

"Get your hands off of me," Liz demands and wrenches her arm out of his grasp. Concern for him aside, he has no right to manhandle her. "What is going on?"

"I did some digging and found out the meeting between the Brigadier - do tell my old friend 'hello' for me when you see him, Agent Malik - and your husband was to hand off info and payment for a hit. I reviewed the info from the incident at your house and it doesn't appear Tom was armed."

They're rushing for the staircase with Dembe in front, his tension evident in the hard set of his shoulders. Meera, acting on instinct, moves to cover their backs and she brushes her blazer to the side to put a hand on her firearm.

Liz, now moving on her own volition, tries to run through the events again as they practically run through the hallway. "You're right. He wasn't armed...he wasn't trying to kill me, was he?"

"He had ample opportunity but didn't take it," agrees Red.

"He wanted to get caught," she reasons, and looks over at Red, who is happy to see she's caught on even as her anxiety rises. "He wanted to be brought here."

He nods. "Agent Malik, I need you to tell Harold it would be in everyone's interest if you moved Tom Keen to another location for the time being. Agent Keen is going to be joining me in my b-"

Overhead, a siren starts screeching.

"Go!" shouts Meera, who pulls her gun from the holster outright.

"You can be angry with me for this later," Red promises Liz before he looks to Dembe with a barely perceptible nod. In the next instant, Liz feels the taller man's arm go around her waist and she is lifted over his shoulder as they sprint to the familiar metal platform in the center of warehouse space.

Red stops only long enough to start initializing the secure hold's lockdown - when he was given that info or clearance is a mystery to her - and then jogs over to them.

"With me, Dembe," he instructs his security guard while he pats him on the shoulder, keeping him in the quickly closing structure. He adds darkly, "I'm not having a repeat of last time, my friend."

Meera calls Cooper from her phone, informing him of their location before running back in the direction they came from. Liz watches her leave from the inside, realizing this is a new perspective for her.

She should be out there, helping her team - strike that, it's probably better she's in here and not out there. Her teammates would know she was a potential target while they were searching the locked down building for him. He killed two people yesterday and went into the situation unarmed; he intentionally took it easy on her to gain access to the building. Who could say he would be as lenient given a second chance.

This actually is a smart spot to put her in, as much as she hates to admit it.

She glances over at Red, and is startled to see he's staring at the glass of the front wall, or rather, staring past it.

No one ever cleaned the glass after the siege.

She watches his adam's apple bob with a thick swallow and he stuffs his hands in his trouser pockets, turning to take in the space with an unaffected expression.

Liz wonders how many people would have a different opinion of the man if they actually took the time to _see _him.

He's expecting her to lash out again. She's sleep deprived and gun shy and she usually doesn't handle her anger very well around him, and with everything taking place right now, he's waiting for her to start in on him. His inspection of their space takes him to the other side of the area, opposite from Dembe, for both men's protection she realizes, should she snap.

He keeps her on her toes. Time to return the favor.

"You shouldn't have done it that way, but thank you, _both _of you," she amends, "for protecting me."

Red stares at her for a second, trying to predict what her next move is, before letting out a laugh.

"No verbal sparring, Lizzie?" he questions, "What are we going to do to pass our time, hmm? I'd suggest 'I Spy' but that becomes exhausting when you play it long enough."

"You could answer some of my questions," she proposes while sitting on the low metal cot, and out of the corner of her eye, she sees Dembe try to stifle a grin.

Red chuckles. "Already covered that part of our routine on the way here, my dear. I think the sleep deprivation and critical incident stress are getting the better of you. You can always answer a few of mine and we'll call it even."

Cool and collected, the man seats himself on the other end of the cot.

It's frustrating, thinking she's making progress (progress towards what, she's not quite sure) and then they end up back here.

She asks softly while watching him for his response, "Is it always going to be like this? Is every conversation going to be a transaction?"

She can't look away even if she wanted to; Red's expression is flat, but there's something piercing about his gaze, imbuing his words with more meaning than they ought to have. "This _is_ a business relationship, is it not, Agent Keen?"

Liz doesn't answer; she is more than aware of the cameras in and surrounding the box. She tries to keep her face emotionless as she asks, carefully "You called the Brigadier a friend. How well did you know him?"

He's answered her questions and protected her, and in what she hopes he understands is a sign of trust, she asks for one more thing.

"We may have run in some of the same circles," he responds, "shared acquaintanc-"

Dembe is out of his chair and she hears the click of the safety on his gun before she sees a person advancing on the box. She never even noticed the alarm turn off.

It's Ressler.

Beside her, Red snorts. "Fitting," he mutters under his breath, but pitches his voice just loud enough for her to hear as he stands to greet the man.

"Agent Ressler," he calls out with his usual forced pleasantness. "Have you caught him, or did you pick this moment in the middle of a situation involving an escaped prisoner to reminisce about our little meaningful moment in this box?"

Ressler ignores the question, and instead walks over to the keypad to enter the access code.

"The situation is over," he manages to inform them before the beeping from the opening device grow too loud to talk over. He waits, impatiently, until the sequence is over and continues.

"The Brigadier is dead."

Stifling her initial shock, Liz watches Red beside her for his reaction.

There isn't one.

"I take it he was Tom Keen's target?" he finally asks, raising an eyebrow.

Ressler responds with a curt nod adding, "He admitted to it. Broke out of the interrogation room after knocking out the agent in there with him, crawled through the ceiling, and dropped into the holding area."

They had searched Tom over thoroughly before bringing him in - even checked his teeth and gums. The agent who had gone into question him had been entirely unarmed.

Brute force. Her husband had killed a man with brute force. Strangling would have taken too long if they were rushing to try to grab Morrison and move him, which meant whatever Tom did was quick.

He probably snapped his neck.

Morrison was a man just as paranoid as Red; the second those alarms went off, he would have been watchful, waiting.

Unless he anticipated the attempt. Welcomed it.

Ordered for it to happen, all the while knowing the money drop would be what brought him in.

Liz feels a rush of dizziness and bile rises in her throat. She closes her eyes to steady herself.

"Donald, I think you ought to take Agent Keen here to the medic, she's looking a bit peaky," suggests Red, and his voice prompts her to get her bearings and open her eyes, set her shoulders, and try to appear more confident than she feels.

"No. No, I'm fine."

Ressler watches her, brow furrowed. "Cooper said he wants to talk to you when you have a second."

Which is just a nice way of saying 'Now'.

"Okay, alright. I just, I just need a second." She gives Ressler what she hopes is a brittle smile, and as expected, he mutters an excuse to leave before the tears start.

She waits until the sound of his footsteps stops echoing off of the high ceiling and turns back to Red. There's a wicked glint in his eyes when he sees hers are dry.

"My god," he laughs, "what are you doing here Lizzie, you are _wasting_ your potential."

"I'm pushing it, I know," she starts before diving in to what she has to say. "But I need two more things from you."

His good humor transforms into something more serious.

"I'll see what I can manage. Tell me what you need, Lizzie."

* * *

**S**he knocks and waits for Cooper to allow her to enter, and when she does, she finds he looks like he hasn't left in days, and his shirt bears creases from his recently removed vest.

"You wanted to see me sir?"

"Take a seat. I saw the camera footage, Keen. I know why you weren't with us," he assures her. "I wanted to see how you were doing...that was before what just took place."

She tries to keep her shrug to a professional, subtle movement. "I've scheduled my session with the mandated counselor."

The Assistant Director exhales heavily. "That's not exactly what I meant, Agent Keen."

Liz sits back in her seat. "These last few days have been...difficult. Very difficult, actually," she admits after taking a deep breath. "I was going to be requesting some time-"

She sees him start to open his mouth, and she rushes to continue. "Reddington refuses to work with anyone else, I know. That's why I already got the next name from him."

Liz offers him the folder she's kept on her lap until now. "Name, details, pretty much everything you'll need, according to him, for you to arrest him. As unconventional and undesirable as you find the situation is, sir, I've tried to make do."

Cooper looks over the information, but she knows he's processing much more than the information before him. He's probably thinking about ways to cut her out of this, or how to get her to admit how she got this information out of their criminal liaison when she wanted it and not on her own time.

"He was very adamant this was a one-time offer," she adds, remembering the rest of their conversation and picking through it for appropriate truths to share. She grits her way through her next sentence, because the next part _does _bother her. "One of his stipulations was his choice of my cover on the next assignment it's required, which I imagine will be soon if I know anything about him, but I felt it was a fair trade.

"A week, sir. I'd like to request a week off. No security detail - I will check in every other day, but right now I need...I need time away from this, from this place. There are some parts of my father's estate that need taking care of, and I'll need to firm up living arrangements."

The house on Twelfth Street is being combed over by techs for evidence, and Liz has already had the surreal experience of seeing her personal photos being combed through by a member of IT.

Cooper considers this for a moment, lips pressed firmly together. "This operation depends heavily on your involvement, Agent Keen," he finally says. "I believe what you are asking is more than fair...although the idea that you are out there without any protection is worrisome to me."

"I have reason to believe Reddington has someone following me, sir. I'm protected, at least for now as long as I'm in his good graces."

It bothers him, it's obvious, but Red's constant need for security is well known.

"Very well. We'll see you in a week, Agent Keen."

Liz walks back to her office with more energy in her step than she's felt in some time, finalizes her report, and stops by Meera's desk to leave a note explaining her absence, as well as a raincheck on their lunch.

After a moment of consideration, she decides to go ahead with another part of her plan and stops by Aram's desk. He's still visibly shaken from what took place earlier, and it's evident in his jumpiness when she starts to approach - he immediately spins around in his seat to see who is coming up behind him.

"Didn't mean t-"

"No, it's not you, it's me," he's quick to assure her. "Moving past the opportunity to make a bad joke about how many times that's been said to me: What can I do for you Agent Ke-Scott? Is it Scott now? Do you _want_ to be called Agent Scott?"

She smiles. "Still Keen, for now at least. Too soon for a change legally." Liz pulls her notepad out of her bag and hands it to Aram, keeping her tone casual. "I'm taking the next week off and thought I might visit a beach, relax a little. Out of season means it will be quiet I think. I remember you mentioned one time a beach town I should check out, somewhere north?"

Aram's confusion is a brief thing. "I-yeah. Yeah it's a nice town...I mean, it's almost Thanksgiving and I know it's got to be freezing with the...I bet the room rates are great though. Let me give you the details - my friend owns a coffee place there. You-you should check it out. Great place."

A few minutes later she's leaving the Post Office in a loaner vehicle, a minivan they usually reserve for undercover work. The plates are switched for her use.

The shopping complex she drives to is forty minutes outside of DC, and she sees Dembe leaning against the town car after she parks towards the back of the lot.

"Thank you," she says as he opens the door for her and she slides into the vehicle. Leather and distinct cologne greet her, as does Raymond Reddington.

"Right on time," he commends her.

"Cooper didn't take much convincing," she explains. "How far down on your list did this assignment rank?"

"Pauolos? He's not even on the list. An annoying little bastard of an arms dealer, I assure you, but not much of a major player in the international field. Your people take him out and a friend of mine has control over most of the Washington State business."

Liz does her best not to gape.

"If it makes you feel any better, my friend has his own standards for ensuring proper use of his firearms before sale. He's ethical, as much as he can be. An honest sort of criminal."

And he's clear on the other side of the US, meaning the team will be focusing their energy and resources on a target far away from where she is.

He pats her arm. "Get some rest, Lizzie. It's a bit of a drive from here to the storage facility, and we'll be dealing with commuter traffic."

On the drive over she had steeled herself for his questions, knowing the flipside of their deal meant she'd be subjected to more than her normal amount of inquiries. An eye for an eye. A question for a question.

He's agreed to her proposal to change the rules, or remove them, for their interactions.

Red must notice her comprehension, because he turns to face the front and put his amber colored shades back on.

"You need some sleep, Liz," he reaffirms.

She settles back into the leather upholstery, and feels some of the tension start to bleed out of her. She's on her way to check on her father's things, and pick up the items she'd packed along with them. Her husband is locked up, his assignment seemingly complete. In her bag is the address of the server that hopefully houses some information on the mystery behind the man seated next to her.

"Wake me up when we get there," she requests in a whisper before closing her eyes.


	6. A Caffeine Stain on Your Midnight Soul

**A/N: Sorry for the delay in posting again. Still didn't gain ownership of any of this.**

**Title taken from 'Torn to Pieces (on Roses)' by ****Susanne Sundfør.**

* * *

Liz wakes to a gentle voice saying her name; wakefulness comes to her in a rush. She sucks in air, eyes flying open, and finds when she shifts to sit up that she's been covered by Red's jacket.

"We're a few minutes out still," he explains, still keeping his voice pitched low and soft. "It's been about two hours."

It doesn't take two hours to get to this area of Bethesda, even in the worst of traffic.

"Thanks," she tries to say, but it comes out as a mumble as she hands him back his jacket.

The corner of Red's lip twitches. The glare on his sunglasses keeps her from seeing much else. "It looked like you needed it," he says as he accepts the jacket back; she know he isn't referring to the cloth in his hands. .

They're in an upscale neighborhood, with large homes recently built on old land. The back of the neighborhood leads to a dirt road. Two miles beyond that, they reach a security checkpoint where Red gives them a password, presses his thumb to an offered iPad, and then enters a pin on the same device.

The storage facility is a house - a mansion, to be exact. Newer than it's plantation feel seems to try to imply, but the grounds have been maintained for quite some time, judging on the size of the trees, and there's ivy climbing the carriage house.

Another glance with a perspective that is older to her but unused recently, and she can find no obvious holes or failures in the security; there's multiple cameras and a slew of armed men stationed around the property, their uniforms black and laden with a variety of weapons.

A theft attempt here would result in human swiss cheese.

After a quick introduction in the foyer, Liz leaves Red and Dembe to catch up with the owner, Francisco, in the drawing room. She's escorted up the grand front staircase.

The second level has been gutted. A long hallway hugs the front windows, which are expertly curtained and have LED candles fluttering in their center panes which she had been able to see from the car.

The outside has been made to incorrectly appear welcoming, while the interior upstairs floors more closely resemble a U-Haul on steroids.

The guard gives her a break down of the security features and shows her to a rich-hued wooden door. The lock is high end, harder to find commercially (although that seems a secondary precaution after the security patrolling the area) and would take more time and skill to pick than the standard sort. It's been given an after-market paint job to give it an antiqued copper finish that matches the soft colors elsewhere on the floor. The inside is a windowless room; she has flashbacks to her shoebox of a dorm room. The inside of the door is reinforced with steel. Besides the desk in the corner, barebones and metal, Sam's boxes are the only other things in the room. The large overnight bag she's brought with her is deposited on top of the desk and she sets to work.

A quick inspection of the small stack of boxes confirms the tape sealing them is still intact. There's a small stroke from a marker on the lid of the box she's looking for, her mark intentionally discrete, and she lifts the heavy cardboard and places it on the desk, using the pocket knife she's brought with her to open the lid.

A hint of musty air wafts up, and she might be imagining it, but underneath that is the lingering scent of Sam's Nebraska home, a combination of citrus cleaners and lingering cigarette smoke. Nestled between some photos and a wooden box containing Sam's watch is her stuffed rabbit.

It was loved, but she remembers throwing it out after the fire - finding it in the box was a surprise the first time. It's still just as burnt and sad-looking, a reminder of that fire, but she finally is in a private enough place to be able to investigate the new weight the childhood toy carries.

The stitches in the back are small, but she slips the knife under them and rips them open. Hidden inside the padding is a small notebook - black, leather covered. She knows this little book very well.

The page of looseleaf that slips out however, is unexpected.

Unfolding it and seeing her father's handwriting is a punch in the gut in a way she could never anticipate, made only more painful when she sees he's addressed the letter using her full name.

_Elizabeth,_

_If you're reading this, I know this book is in good hands but things must be bad. Keep that spine and your head, Butterball. Be smart about this._

_I'm sorry if things ended like we talked about. Parents aren't supposed to ask that of their kids. They're supposed to be the strong ones. They're not supposed to be afraid of a hospital bed. I'm sorry if you think it was a selfish choice. If you hate me or you're angry with me, I understand._

_There are a lot of things I wish I was around to tell you_, _or maybe I have. I hope you're safe. Please know that none of it changes how much I love you._

_I know you can take care of yourself, Butterball. Even still, there are people who will look out for you. Parents don't stop being parents just because their kids grow up - we just worry a little quieter._

_I love you, kiddo. I'm proud of you._

_Daddy_

Liz places the note down on the desk. She feels like she wants to cry, but even though her eyes sting, it never happens. She's left with no escape from staring at the words and feeling guilt in the pit of her gut.

Dying sick and slowly in a hospital bed was her dad's greatest fear. Some might say a foolish one, since that sort of thing was highly likely, but really one of the very few fears Liz ever knew the man to have - and as she's only just learned, there were a great many things Sam could have realistically feared.

It started when her Uncle Corbin went to the doctor's after having headaches and migraines enough to keep him from helping with his usual work - boosting cars. Corbin made it an effortless art, and even hung over and sick as a dog, the man could deliver. For him to beg out of a job was unheard of.

The doctor sent him for tests. The tests found a tumor. The tumor killed him.

It's easier to summarize the story like that. It's harder for Liz to think about the months that passed where they all took turns with him at doctors' appointments and then in the hospital. Liz, in her sophomore year of college in another state, was unable to come back and visit until the very end. The man in the bed wasn't her loping and long-legged uncle then, just thin, papery skin and bones seeming to try to push their way out.

She joined her father and her family - a loosely associated group of people who were constantly coming and going and fighting and helping and teaching but always looking out for one another when it mattered - after the funeral to drink away the grief, and that was where Sam had asked her to make sure they both didn't go through what Corbin and his family had just gone through if it ever came to that.

Liz had initially waved it off as inebriated conversation, but it was something her father continued to ask her about, and ask her to promise. He said it nicely, he used lots of euphemisms, but Liz, on her last day home, whittled the topic down into a sharp, jagged statement:

"You're hypothetically asking your daughter to euthanize you, Dad."

The conversation stalled, since she refused to continue, and Liz went back to school.

It was only two months later that Maggie Cornish, her roommate, lost her father. He'd been hospitalized and too far down on the waiting list for organ donation. Maggie, adopted as well, wasn't a match, and Liz watched her roommate dissolve into a ghost even before her father became one.

When Maggie decided to spend the weekend at home with her mother after the funeral, Liz drank herself into a sobbing mess in her dorm room and called her father at two in the morning and agreed to his request.

They were both selfish like that. Sam didn't want to suffer, and Liz didn't want to watch herself become a numb shell like that, so powerless.

Sitting now in the room with his letter reminds Liz that she failed her dad, in a twisted way. Sam never asked much from her, but this one thing she could do for him, she'd failed at. It was why she'd argued so much with him on the phone; she didn't want to accept he was sick, and she didn't want to have to follow through with the promise.

She can't change what happened, she reminds herself. Her dad died in his hospital room, before his daughter or son-in-law could reach his side. It's over it's happened, and now she needs to move on with things. Dad

Red had given her and Sam a second chance at life, and she needs to know _why_ Red needed her before she could help him.

It's the second reason she's here.

Placing Sam's black notebook and his letter to the side of the desk, Liz returns to the stacks and searches through the unlabelled boxes to find the one containing items from her college days and subsequent time at Quantico. She doesn't need all of it, just the ones from her criminology classes, and transfers the dogeared notebooks and a binder to the waiting weekend bag. The small notebook goes into her purse.

She seals the boxes back up with new patterned novelty tape - harder to replace undetected should someone want to go through the boxes - and exits the storage room to return to the first floor with the guard.

Red notices her entrance while Francisco is still talking. There's the quick flicker of his gaze to the heavy bag on her shoulder and he's gracefully finding a way to end the conversation with a promise of a return in the near future. She shakes the owner's hand, thanks him and soon they're back in the car and travelling to her van.

"Was everything to your satisfaction?" Red asks, breaking the silence. Liz nods.

"Yes. And seeing it for myself gave me peace of mind. Thanks."

Red turns to the window before he speaks, but Liz has a feeling he's still watching her through the sunglasses; it's almost too dark for him to need them, not that she thinks practicality has ever stopped the man's sartorial choices.

"I have to admit, Lizzie, I was a little shocked when you told me you had those papers stowed away in your bathroom. That's definitely your old man's move."

"He had prepped for both of us," Liz explains, and rationalizes that giving him this info is a way of showing gratitude for his quick and efficient help when she's needed it, multiple times, in the last few days. "In case things with a job went bad."

Red makes a humming noise, considering the information. Liz turns to watch his face, to see his reaction, but sees firmly pursed lips and a set jaw and concludes he's considering her words, as they weren't what he anticipated.

"Hell of a time to choose to go to the shore," he remarks, as they pull into the parking lot and Dembe pulls the car up next to her van. Her hand hovers over the door handle. "The town's going to be dead for the holiday."

Liz turns back around to face him, looking him square in the eye, knowing he'll understand.

"Working on my truths," she says simply, and she watches him, trying to see what his real reaction is.

"Good," he says, levelly, but she sees the tiny muscle tic below one eye. The smile that stretches across his lips reminds her too much of the one he wore in the box when she'd been brought before him. "My people will keep an eye on you, but don't expect to see them."

Dembe helps her with the weekend bag and after she watches them pull out of the parking lot, she walks into Target and buys essentials for the week ahead; she's got the clothing on her back, a bag full of notes, and her father's notebook. She needs to temporarily replace everything that's currently evidence in the office.

Part of her gets a kick out of imaging Red's indignant response to the price and quality of the clothing she throws in her cart, but decides to stop the exercise when she finds herself in the lingerie section.

Snacks for the drive and the hotel room get thrown in the cart as well. So does a brand new spiral bound notepad and a suitcase - she's not going to walk into the hotel with plastic bags. The cart is pretty full by the time she checks out and the bags get thrown in the backseat before she starts on her way.

Her first stop is Millersville Extra Space Storage. Compared to Francisco's amenities, it's bare bones, but the small locker is well secured and has been for quite some time. It's location between both Baltimore and DC had made it ideal - long before she'd even started to doubt her husband's identity, that holdover sense of self-preservation taught to her by Sam had her renting out locker space under one of her old IDs and stowing away money and a few essentials. It wasn't a box in her floorboards; it was a hell of a lot more secure.

To be honest, she's not sure where things are going - everything with Tom has her questioning her understanding of the situation, and working with Reddington has taught her to be prepared. A week off from her job is not necessarily a week of from Red. She owes the man a debt and if he calls upon her to help him with something, she's got to be prepared. Improvisation is a necessity in her dealings with him.

There's an ID, two credit cards, and several large gift cards, as well as cash. She takes it all.

Her next stop is another two towns out of her way at big name convenience store where she buys two prepaid phone with cash and then barely makes it into a courier store down the street to get one overnight shipped. The man behind the counter scarcely looks over the information before giving her a receipt; he wants to lock up and get home.

On the way back to her car, Liz exhales, watches her breath form a cloud before her, and considers her actions. Her behavior is going to appear suspicious if she's being followed by someone from work - she's been keeping a close eye out while she's been driving, so she thinks she's safe for now. If anything happens, she's rationalized, she can say Red asked her to do it; turning the tables and making him go along with her plan would be interesting.

The FBI agent busies herself with packing her purchases into the suitcase before getting back on the road.

For now though, she's got to keep going. In the span of time both in the box and then after, Liz committed to this plan. She's getting to the bottom of what happened to Red because it also means she'll find out more about herself. It also means Red will have less to hold over her in future negotiations.

She's armed with her own class notes on Red and the Brigadier, and hopefully when she arrives in Delaware, with the old unaltered data from that server. Liz is willing to place money on the theory that info has been changed on both men since that data was saved, and not because they were appropriately linked to past crimes. There's a reason this old data needed to disappear, and she's going to find out why.

She's called Red a monster, and she knows him well enough now to realize that's not the case, not really. Like the Brigadier, she thinks he had to become one. She has to be careful with this theory.

Her precautions right now are based off of what she's learned from cases and Sam, She's thinking like a criminal, and no, it isn't that hard for her.

It's dark by the time she reaches the shore town of Rehoboth, and the area is fairly quiet. The check in at the boutique hotel goes quickly and soon she's sitting on the top of a fluffy cloud of a duvet on a king-size bed and taking in the butterscotch yellow walls of the well-sized hotel room. The hotel is nearly empty and there's a chill that soon has her, pajama-clad, burrowing down into the sheets and the welcome heaviness of the duvet.

In the morning, she hits snooze twice before finally getting out of bed and managing to just grab an apple in the tiny dining area while they're cleaning up the breakfast items.

She'll have breakfast at the Coffee Connection in Lewes.

Her first stop of the morning is the big electronics store on the Coastal Highway to use cash and gift cards to buy a laptop and external hard drive - she's only planning on visiting the coffee shop once.

Mark Jacobus fits in well with the laid-back own, but Liz can't see how he fits, friendship-wise, with the animated, nearly neurotic tech back at the P.O. He accepts her excuse (friend of Aram's who he asked to look over Mark's system and update it) and sets her up in the back room of the small Main Street coffee shop.

Liz pulls out her burner phone and calls the other one now in Aram's possession thanks to the overnight courier.

"Hello?" he hesitantly answers.

"Aram."

"Liz? You sent me the phone?"

She closes her eyes, settles back into the cheap computer chair and holds her breath for a second to keep from exhaling loudly into the phone.

Aram figures it out. "Right. Okay, that's obvious now, sorry. I just figured this kind of thing was something Red would do. "

She ignores that.

"Aram," she keeps her voice down, despite the busy hum on the other side of the door. "You need to tell me what the encryption is on this thing. I wasn't going to call you at work or on a line that's monitored...you didn't report the phone, did you?"

"God, no, I'm not an idiot. Now give me a second to go over this in my head before we start for real."

Within minutes, he's walked her through the system and she's got the files before her, slightly grainy on the PC. After a nervous glance at the door, she pulls out the new portable drive and plugs it into the old tower. Aram has to help her through forcing the install to the older operating system.

When her search for 'Reddington' and two of his other aliases comes up with nothing, she passes this info to Aram on the other side of the call.

"It was 'Red'," he explains, mouth full of something, probably cereal, "I saw him referred to as 'Red'."

This is taking too long. Liz looks down at the packing for the hard drive and then finds the size of the database by clicking back. Twenty years ago this probably seemed like a large file for transportation, but now that information could fit on a $150 purchase from Best Buy.

Soon enough she's watching the little paper airplanes sailing across the pop up screen above the progress bar and countdown.

She thanks Aram, and hangs up.

Liz takes Marcus up on his offer of another cup of coffee, this time with a small sandwich, but declines the offer of a companion for lunch.

For someone committing what could amount to treason, she eats her lunch just fine.

Another 45 minutes and the process is finished. She packs up quickly, grabs a second sandwich for her dinner, and heads back to Rehoboth and her hotel room.

Anticipation and caffeine leave her jittery as she sets up the new laptop and plugs in the hard drive after ensuring any sort of wifi or bluetooth is turned off on the laptop.

This time, she searches for 'Red' as a known alias, and results pop up quickly.

The files are typed in, with no images. While she knows the image files were probably harder to store than the plain text, it still makes no sense for the files to have _none_. She pores over the files detailing the cases he was linked to and other intel for hours, until her eyes feel dry and grainy and her protesting stomach makes her take a break.

Her notepad, by this time, is covered with dates and locations, and none of them make sense with the information she knew to be _factual _about his past. How could a month-long absence to Hong Kong to sell illegal arms to a Middle Eastern terrorist group go unmarked in his Naval Academy record, which she had furiously studied before her first meeting with him?

She brushes crumbs off of her notepad and taps it with her pen as she reopens a file and rereads it. The writing is bothering her, strange as it seems. The writing seems too perfect for a field agent's quick typing. She's accustomed to the occasional misspelling or additional space or punctuation mark, and the absence of these typos makes her realize just how many she typically sees.

None of the files refer to him by name, only 'Red'.

Liz opens another file, and this one could be a novel. About half way through the file, she decides she wants to compare Red's files to the Brigadier's and moves her cursor up to the corner to close out of the window when her eyes catch on the actual name of the file and she freezes.

Embedded within numbers and letters is the word 'gatz'. Looking back over the other files, she finds the word in other file names.

"Son of a bitch," she hisses, and returns to the search screen to look up information on the Brigadier. Just as she suspected, the word 'gatz' is hidden in some of the other file names as well. Reading some of the older files on him reveals they have the same writing style, while the cases closer to 1990 included photos and further details in much less wordy files. Real intel with proof.

Scanning for the word 'gatz' as a file name only brings up matches for Red and the Brigadier.

Liz doesn't need to go back to her notes from college to remember the significance of the name. Back in college, the idea that the government would name a project after a literary character had seemed strange, but her current level of clearance has exposed her to other projects and operations with more obvious names.

He'd even said it, too. He'd _told _her "Everything about me is a lie," and she'd simply brushed the statement aside.

These files are captured prior to '89, from the beginning stages of 'Red' being created, being spread, by word of mouth amongst assets and intelligence agents. The reason none of them are fully linked to Raymond Reddington is because he didn't do any of the things now currently tied to him.

Had they used the name because they had him in mind, or was it just coincidence?

She scrambles over to the bag with her old notes, pulls out the one from one of her criminology seminars on contemporary history, and flips through the pages to the brief discussion of Reddington. Between her own notes from work and the ones in this notebook, she can only confirm his involvement in events after 1990, when he disappeared.

So what happened in 1990, or rather, what went wrong? She can't log in to the current database without drawing suspicion - if she's on vacation, the expectation is that she's not checking work email or researching any casework. She can't ask Aram for his info, because IPs are logged and while he could probably walk her through masking hers, it's too late (or rather, early, after she glances at the clock on the computer) for her to be any good to him.

So instead, she decides to use Google.

If she was more awake, she'd probably never do it. It's late-night rationale. She searches for a timeline of crimes occurring in 1990 and spends half an hour searching through the results with nothing standing out to her. She's not sure what she's going to do in the morning, she thinks begrudgingly, because this clearly isn't working.

Until the page she's just clicked on finishes loading and a familiar painting comes into view.

Liz leans forward in her seat and stares.

_The Storm on the Sea of Galilee_ stares back.

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**Thanks to tumblr user Agents of S.P.A.D.E.R. for the post regarding the painting, it helped immensely! **


	7. Choked by a Weak Tongue

**I want to apologize for the delay in updating - I rewrote this chapter twice. Just really got stuck on it, and I'm sorry for that.**

**Still don't own any of this, just borrowing.**

**Chapter title from "Strings" by MS MR. Head over to my profile for a link to the 8tracks mix with all of chapter title songs!**

* * *

**S**he remembers the look on Red's face when she'd first entered the room the day she'd accused him of framing Tom. As angry as she was, she remembers the contemplative regret on his features as he looked over the painting.

At the time, she had given it deeper meaning, but maybe it was truly because of his past being connected to the painting. Was that the first time he'd actually been involved in criminal activity as 'Red'? How the hell is she even going to bring it up to him?

Too much. It is too much to figure out tonight...or this morning, as it already is past 2 am. Liz stumbles away from the desk on legs far past the point of pins-and-needles numb as she quickly prepares for bed and climbs into her down-fluffed shelter. She wills her racing brain to slow down for a few hours so she can get some sleep and figure out the next step in her hunt for Red's past, and her own.

Liz barely settles into sleep when the burner phone, the one Red had slipped her, buzzes and brightens on the bedside table. With a childish whimper of protest, she sits up to grab the device off the bedside dresser.

"What?" she answers, pulling the phone into her cocoon of warmth. She isn't planning on leaving her current location or position unless the hotel itself is on fire, and only then if she is personally instructed to do so. Hotels have fire doors these days, anyway.

"Whatever happened to the dog?"

Liz shifts and pulls back the phone to peek at the time displayed on it. It's 4 am, and Red's voice is pitched high and light. When she returns the phone to her ear, the man is still talking despite her lack of an answer, but she doesn't think she's missed anything of importance.

"-mean it, he was a shitty watch dog."

Liz doesn't let on that she missed half of his rant. "We decided to give him to our fri-" she catches herself, and grimaces "-to one of Tom's coworkers at the school. Hudson was cooped up all day by himself. It wasn't right...And he's a _good_ dog."

The man on the other end of the phone takes a loud gulp of something, and Liz gives the duvet an incredulous look for lack of having anyone else to share her disbelief with.

"He didn't even bark when I came in for a look around, d'you know that? All four times...And the requirements for being a good dog are sucking up for attention, humping things you shouldn't, and sniffing asses. That's a horrible defense, Lizzie. Politicians do the same things."

Liz settles further in, preparing for a long conversation. Of course he broke into her house - she's surprised he's admitting to it. The man monologues normally; inebriated, who knows how long he'll go now. "Why did you actually call me, Red?" she demands, trying to keep the half-awake, mostly exhausted amusement out of her voice.

"What is that noise?"

"It's the duvet. It's noisy."

"It sounds like it's smothering you."

There's a pause, and then she hears the noise of glass on glass, followed by something glugging. She can just make out him muttering "I miss those" in an entirely unaffected voice before returning to the phone and his feigned joviality.

"Back to the dog, Lizzie," he starts, but she interrupts him, now fully awake and catching on to his game.

"You're not really that drunk, Red. Cut the crap."

He's quick to respond, but she hears the half-second hesitation from the man who always has an answer ready for everything.

"What makes you think-"

"-You wanted to talk to me about something you didn't think I'd normally answer, something you thought I would find out of character for you. You reasoned I'd be more receptive to the topic since I'd be half-awake, and you're seemingly drunk, meaning we are both emotionally vulnerable."

Liz wishes she could see his face right now; part of her really enjoyed getting to see his reaction to her profile in the restaurant that night in Montreal.

"So what is it, Red? What did you want to talk about?"

"'Character'," he echoes, with a burst of dry laughter, and says nothing else, seeming to be lost in his own thoughts.

When he doesn't answer her question and there's nothing but their breathing for a while, Liz considers hanging up, but then mentally reviews their last conversation in the car. What had bothered him then, which might trigger the call now?

It was something about Sam, and her knowing how to hide the papers.

She doesn't have to prompt him, because he provides her confirmation with his next words.

"His plan was to get out, start over."

His voice is flat, but Liz knows it's a mask. She lets the silence stretch between them, the only noise their breathing, until he continues. "He said he wanted to give you a better life."

Liz can't help but defend her parent. This conversation is clearly not going to end shortly, so she tucks the phone between her check and the pillow before answering.

"And he did, Red. He loved me and gave me a family to grow up in. Maybe not a traditional one, but...Sam, he just...he tried I think, at first. The garage in the first town, that was clean. I think he just couldn't turn that part of him off. He was good, he just...," she laughs, closes her eyes, and lets a wave of nostalgia wash over her. "We certainly weren't pulling international jobs when I started getting involved, and I don't think they ever did much worse before that. It was petty stuff, comparatively. Never got caught, that I know of, so he was definitely still good at it. It was always fun, and a little scary, but aside from the fire, it was a good childhood."

He makes a small noise in the back of his throat, a sort of humming, noncommittal noise of acknowledgement. She hears another sip. "Just not what I pictured back then." _For you_, goes unspoken.

Liz stares in the direction of the window, the faint glow of Rehoboth Ave's streetlights filtering in through the curtains, which she can barely see over the edge of the covers.

"Well," she draws the word out as she considers her answer. She could reprimand him, tell him Sam owed him nothing, that he didn't have a _right_ to be upset about _her _life. She could.

But she finds herself trying to say something comforting to him.

After another moment of consideration, she says, "People in our lives don't owe it to us to live up to our expectations. Their choices, who they are, they can be really... surprising," she finishes, lamely.

"Is that what you're finding right now, Lizzie?"

Damn the man, he saw an opportunity to ask her about her progress and took it.

The FBI agent desperately wants to ask him about the Gatz Project, about the painting, and about how the hell he ended up where he is now due to the former two topics. The farther she goes with this hunt for the truth regarding Raymond Reddington, the more she questions just how much she's really even looking to find out about herself, and how much of this is simply because she just wants to _know_.

So she can't talk to him about any of it yet, not really. Not until she figures out her own motivation.

"Jury's still out," she finally answers him, intentionally vague. She could be talking about Tom, or Sam, he couldn't know.

"Good," he responds, flatly. "Get some sleep, Lizzie."

The ended call causes the screen underneath her cheek to light back up, and she pulls the device away and inspects the call time. Thirty eight minutes. She just spent the last thirty eight minutes talking to the Concierge of Crime in the middle of the night and it was a legitimate conversation. She turns the screen off, but doesn't make the effort to emerge from the covers and put the phone back before trying to get a little sleep before starting her day.

Liz wakes up only a few hours later and moves forward.

The boardwalk is bitterly cold; there's barely anyone out or around. Liz's attempt to take a walk is curtailed by the wind. She takes refuge in a tiny coffee shop a few blocks back from the waterfront and orders a drink with cinnamon and spice that warms and bites and wakes her up a bit more. After a sandwich and a refill, she heads back out and down the street to the local library.

If someone is on to her, they'd notice how close the IP on her laptop and the library's are, but up until this point she's been cautious, so she thinks she's in the clear. Her new notepad and the shared drive were packed into her purse before she left the hotel this morning, and they barely add any weight to the bag; her gun is also in there, and she's making an effort of correcting her posture like Meera suggested. She's being careful. She's trying to think ahead. If anyone is following her, they're good and she hasn't caught sight of them in the nearly abandoned town.

She'll have to commend Red's ordered tail during their next inevitable phone conversation because she hasn't caught sight of them once.

She spends some time reviewing publicly available information regarding the Boston Museum heist in the library's limited selection of books on the subject and then on a computer terminal, but the info is next to nothing. She tries to remind herself she's attempting to unravel a mystery over two decades old, and mostly using information that's not entirely confirmed, but she still feels an itch under her skin, a need to figure this out. It could be a bargaining chip, or a sign of how far she's willing to go to learn to the truth.

Staring at the files on the drive back in her hotel room doesn't help much, either. She gets little sleep that night.

Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, rolls around, and there's a little more life around town. The pressure to get answers before her return to work is building, as is her frustration. It's not turning into a relaxing vacation at all, not that she planned for it to really be.

The FBI agent forces herself to take a walk on the boardwalk, properly bundled, and tries to clear her mind.

It doesn't work of course; she instead worries over what is preventing her from making any progress, and what could help her.

Liz likes using the boards at work. Moving pages and info around. Creating links. Spatial-visual stuff.

She stops into the drugstore on her way back, grabs a multipack of scotch tape, Post-it notes, a ream of paper, markers, and cheap yarn in a few colors, swings by the shop from before for a large coffee, and enters her hotel room with her shoulders squared and a fierce sense of determination.

Liz starts writing down facts and dates as best as she can perceive them: when Red graduated from Naval Academy, when Red's car was found abandoned, and the dates of a few of the charges which she can confirm he was actually involved with from conversation with him. She tapes these in chronological order, left to right, across the entire expanse of the wall behind her bed and steps back to look at it.

It's barebones, a brief abstract of a life.

Hidden somewhere in this mess is her life, too.

Liz starts to fill in other information, adding what she can where she can, tacking Post-it notes above with questions to herself.

She adds in info like her own birth and adoption and the birth of Red's daughter, and sees the first and third dates are years apart. She leaves the Gardner Museum heist above the timeline, hovering without a piece of string to mark it as a part of his confirmed timeline. She walks around and stares and ignores the weak sunlight starting to glow behind the curtains and continues to work until head and limbs feeling heavy, Liz drops into the small arm chair leaning against the wall closest to the current side of the timeline, in the narrow space between the bed and the wall, and looks up at her work. There's so many blanks, perhaps too many blanks.

Maybe if she looks at it long enough and hard enough…

"Got to admit, this was definitely not what I was expecting."

Liz jerks her head away from the wall and finds she's part of the tableau being taken in by Reddington, standing in the middle of her hotel room. Shit. She must have nodded off.

Running a hand through her hair, Liz looks around to see how bad the damage is.

The hotel room is in shambles.

The desk is covered in paper, yarn, notepads and Post-it notes. There are takeout containers strewn around the room, and stacks of empty coffee cups. He's still in his coat, but the ever-present hat is hanging off of a corner of the TV. His hands are behind his back, and he is surveying her work.

Elizabeth feels her cheeks burn.

"Red, I-"

"-My people told me they hadn't seen you out of the room since yesterday. You didn't answer the phone. I called you twice," he explains curtly, eyes still sliding over the timeline, starting from the beginning and taking his time until he reaches 'now' and Liz. "You want an apology for breaking in, I imagine."

She should. She does, a little. Just not enough to say anything...At what point did she start to _welcome_ these invasions of her privacy?

When she doesn't take his offered opening to lash out, there's a flicker of surprise in his eyes before he starts to take off his coat and continues speaking as he drapes it on the edge of her bed.

"I thought you were here to learn about yourself, Lizzie." His gaze is level and face stoic, but she knows that internally, he's coiled, preparing, it seems, for whatever her answer is going to be, and probably already has half a dozen responses prepared. Raymond Reddington, playing the chess game of life. It's like the ease of their most recent phone conversation is gone and was never there.

Liz unfolds herself in the chair, unable to hide her wince when a muscle in her neck twinges painfully. "And I am. Our pasts, they're connected."

"One Post-it note on a wall covered with my life?" he questions her, and then gives a brief shake of his head. "You undervalue yourself."

Frustration prickles under the surface of her wakeful disorientation. "I know there's more," she says quickly, almost defensively, "I'm still working on the rest."

Now he's intentionally being aloof, a well-dressed sphynx in her hotel room. "Long way to go."

She seethes.

"Damn it, Red," she growls before she can stop herself. She's out of the chair and standing in front of him in an instant. "What do you expect from me? You told me _one_ piece of what I need. You think I'm just going to spend years happy to chase after the crumbs you drop for me to follow? This is my life, _mine_, and you hold it over me. You hold it just out of reach and I can't," she pauses to suck in a deep breath and try to calm herself down. She continues in a much more controlled voice.

"It starts with _you_. I had an opportunity to learn a little more, to help me start, so I took it."

Nothing happens for what seems like forever.

His lips part, and she's so close she can hear it when he sucks in air to talk.

"I'm worried about you, Lizzie."

His voice is low and calm and for a second she wants to question what he means before she realizes what he's doing.

"Don't redirect," she warns him, moving closer, intentionally invading his personal space.

He's unphased. "Liz, if you promise me-"

"Stop it."

He raises an eyebrow and ignores her barefeet coming into contact with the tips of his shoes. "Have you looked-"

"-Tell me the truth." She uses the steely voice that caused her coworkers to call her 'sir' back in New York. It goes unnoticed and he tries to change the subject again.

"Why don't we-"

"Tell me!" she shouts, the heels of her hands hitting him just below the shoulders and _pushing_.

They're close in height, and for a second, it seems surprise is working to her advantage when he takes a small step back and she continues to push, trying to put enough pressure on one shoulder to get him to turn so she can hold him against the wall.

"Goddamn it, Elizabeth!"

There's frustration and fear on his face and she falters.

He grabs at her wrists and before she can register what he's doing, he twists and gets a leg behind her knees. Liz falls gracelessly into a seat on the edge of the bed. Her hands still captive, Red takes his time squatting before her.

"Let go of me," she snarls, because there's _emotion_ on Raymond Reddington's face and right now she just wants to be angry and not think, not think about how he seems to care about her. She just wants to be angry at the Concierge of Crime who is manipulating the government for his own vendetta and using her as a _toy_ for reasons she can't discern. She doesn't want to see him as a person because it removes layers between them that she wants to keep in place.

She's scaring him. He doesn't have to say it because it's written on his face.

They're both rattled. There's something raw and _human_ about his expression, watching her, eyes wide and mouth parted. She struggles against him and repeats her demand.

"Liz, you've haven't really slept in days, and you've barely eaten."

The woman balks. "That's not true, I've been-"

"-Been ordering food and bringing it back here without really touching it? I don't even think you're aware of how little you've eaten."

She can protect herself with barbs and intentionally insensitive statements. Make him think she's immature, and brash, and maybe he'll stop giving her so much credit,maybe he'll give her answers and walk away. "Did the person you paid to _stalk_ me tell you that?" she asks, acidly.

He's not supposed to rise to her jab. "No, you're fucking garbage can told me," he snaps.

Liz actually has to look for herself to believe it. Since she's turned down housekeeping out of concern over someone entering her room, the trash hasn't been taken out. Boxes and bags from all the meals she's been grabbing and bringing back with her are in the trash, still filled. A pizza from the day before remains untouched, still open with one slice sitting half-eaten inside.

A quick count and the hours of sleep she's actually gotten since she arrived fit on one hand.

Oh god, he's right.

Red's grip of her wrists lessens but remains. "Before I got here, I thought you were trying to find out info on Tom, or maybe Sam. I thought that's what you meant when you said you were looking for truths."

Liz closes her eyes and exhales deeply as she shakes her head. "I didn't want to think about Tom, about what he did and how I felt and I - I jumped on an opportunity to fixate on something else. On you. I wasn't even _aware_ of it, I was so…" she trails off, swallowing the lump in her throat.

She reopens her eyes when she feels the brush of his thumb along her scar. It's a steady repetitive action, a sort of unconscious attempt to soothe.

"Red, I mean it though. I shouldn't have lashed out like that," she adds, "but I meant it. You drop hints about knowing me and having information about me and-"

He shakes his head, and tells her apologetically "I can't tell you everything, Liz. I don't-"

She does nothing to try to hide the plaintive but firm note in her voice. "-You could tell me more than you have. You wanted me to find out the truth about Tom on my own but this is _me_, and you, and I need to know."

The man watches her, assessing the situation it seems, weighing out the scale of trust between them, trying to see if it's evenly heavy on both sets of shoulders and minds.

"I trusted you with my father's things," she reminds him. "And you trusted me enough to take me to that location - I could have easily removed my belongings and reported it."

He watches her for a moment, face emotionless. "Say things like that and I might question that trust," he warns her in a flat voice.

Too much of a hesitation in his response - it's an empty threat.

He changes tactics and states, pointing, "You've got info about Gatz up there."

"Yes," she says steadily, refusing to say more.

"Not many people know that I was involved in that...in fact, one of them paid for your husband to kill him."

"I meant it," she repeats her demand from before. "Stop redirecting. Bringing up Tom isn't going to distract me….Whatever you tell me, whatever it is," she assures him. "I'll still help with the list."

"That's a lofty promise from a person in your current state of mental exhaustion."

Liz exhales heavily. "I feel like I'm blind and drowning," she admits, swallowing thickly before continuing. "But how the hell am I supposed swim towards air if I don't know which way is up?"

The man looking up at her shuts his eyelids slowly, and the distance between them is small enough to hear the noise of his breath leaving him in a rush, feel it slightly on her chin and neck. He reaches behind him for the chair and moves to slide up and into it, leaning back and running his hand over his close trimmed head.

It's a thoughtful gesture, a nervous one.

Liz's hands feel cool and empty now that he's released them; she'd forgotten he was holding them until he let go.

The man leans forward, and Liz does the same, shifting to sit on an angle to face him better. He eyes her warily for a moment before declaring, "If this conversation is to take place, I have one condition: You say 'yes' to what I ask you after we're done talking."

"You _would_ find a way to get one more thing out of this," she mutters and then thinks 'fuck it', because she's already made this bed, and she's out of other options. She needs to remember to keep herself on her toes, but she won't come to harm, whatever he's going to ask her.

"Okay," she agrees finally and reluctantly. "Okay, whatever you ask after is a 'yes'."

Raymond Reddington rises from the chair after a moment and crosses around the bed to the note on the wall with her adoption date, and she twists and brings her knees up onto the bed to watch when he taps the wall there. His every move seems weighted with importance, slow and drawn out, or maybe it's just her perception.

"You want the truth Lizzie? It all goes back to this."

"My adoption," she states, shifting more to fold and cross her legs tailor-style on the bedsheets.

"Your father, your biological one," he corrects, and then puts his hands in his pockets. "Jacob Compton. Wanted in more countries than I can name and for more things than I could list. He has connections everywhere and there is no limits to what he'd do for a pay day. He likes high-risk thefts for the thrill of it. He likes his trophies."

She surmises she was one of those, in a way. A legacy. A doll.

A punching bag when needed.

"Our intent was to get in with his crew, embed ourselves...But Sam saw you and that was it. Getting you out became his whole focus. We did the job, and I managed to set it up, got you and Sam out and hidden from the Feds and from Compton; Sam knew I'd be under close scrutiny from both sides. We weren't sure we'd be able to cross paths again, not for a while.

"Compton raged. He _raged._ He'd accepted me into his crew at that point after I proved myself and he had us combing every possible lead to find you. You were stolen goods though, not an abducted child in his eyes."

Even if she tries, she can't remember that part of her life, and with every passing word from the man before her, Liz doesn't want to.

What does her kidnapping, for a lack of a better term, years ago, have to do with now?

The question sits on the tip of her tongue as she stares past him at the timeline for a moment before she has to ask it. "Did he ever find out you were involved?"

Her answer is a nod, a swallow, and a gruff "Yes."

"What happened?"

Emotion is wiped from his face before he answers. "December 1990 and the facts that are no longer contained in my files because someone deemed it important to remove: the safe house my family had been moved to became a crime scene. A crime scene with no bodies, mind you. They were never found. It was kept neat. Very clean. Just enough blood for me to guess at what happened."

Liz reels and tries to process what he's telling her.

Family for family. Daughter for daughter. Use the Stewmaker to remove any evidence Red could use to find out the truth.

Retaliation. Revenge. It fits for a man like Compton.

Liz covers her mouth, bile rising in her gut and she doesn't want to be right, but she knows. How can he answer that question so easily? How can he stand to work with her, knowing that everything that happened to his family was because of a man she was related to, and it started because of what Sam asked of him? Why would he actively seek her out?

Raymond Reddington is planning something.

He needs her. He has her. He'll do what it takes to keep her safe. He's told her these things, and proven them. If he wanted to keep her as a naive pawn, he wouldn't be telling her any of this - and it's the truth. She knows his tells now, and knows he's telling her the truth.

"What are you planning, Red?"

He takes in a breath in a hiss, and his turn to inspect the timeline is a hair too quick.

"You weren't supposed to catch on that quickly, Lizzie," he answers, voice smooth and controlled.

"Too late," she retorts bluntly while trying to not imagine where this conversation could be headed, because it does her no good to be prematurely angered. "What's the plan?"

He must be aware of how well she can read him now, because he seems intent to avoid her gaze, instead reading over her work on the wall. "The plan is in flux, at the moment. Depends on a few new pieces of information I'm waiting on."

When he offers no further elaboration, Liz studies the man in profile, trying to fit this information in with what she already knows, but finds there are still more holes in the picture of the past she's trying to put together.

Sam worked with him, and it sounds like he was even aware of Reddington's involvement in the Gatz Project. She wonders what her Dad's reaction would have been to this plan involving her and Compton.

He would have wrung the man's neck.

"Did Sam know you were going to use me against Compton?"

"No matter what, you were going to be kept safe," he says crossly, fixing her with a serious look, and adds, "but no, he wasn't aware of my initial plans."

"What changed? Why did the plan change?"

"I met you," he says, and the simple truth echoes with unsaid, complicated implications. Liz blinks, and before she can even open her mouth, he continues. "And I came to be in position of a photo taken by someone we both know quite well, and it confirmed what I was already half-suspecting: the Stewmaker was given a body, but it wasn't my daughter."

"The missing picture in the album" Liz frowns. "But you had to have some other evidence she'd survived before that, before you turned yourself in."

There's a spark of something in his eye, dangerous but happy to come to the surface, elated to be recognized.

"I found my wife contracted to kill Harold Cooper in Kuwait four years after she was supposed to be a corpse in Pennsylvania. If she survived that night, my daughter may have as well."

He ignores the look of shock on her face at his statement. Raymond Reddington claps his hands together, tone instantaneously upbeat and pleasant.

"I think that's enough of that for today. I already know you're answer to the question, but I feel I still need to ask: Liz, will you join me for Thanksgiving dinner?"


	8. Stones on Weathered Shores

**A/N: Still don't own a thing. Chapter title from S. Carey's "Broken".**

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**L**iz feels her eyebrows rise and the extreme sign of disbelief causes her to feel just how dry and tired her face is.

"You can't stop there."

"Can and have. We're moving on to the next topic. Will you join me for Thanksgiving dinner, Elizabeth?"

"Dinner? That's what I was coerced into saying 'Yes' to?" she seeks to clarify in a high-pitched voice that Red ignores, instead arranging his features into theatrical offense. She heard it before, but feels the need to repeat it.

"Is it really that much of a chore to share a meal with me on a holiday? Lizzie, I'm hurt."

She stares at him, trying to keep frustration from boiling too highly in her. She takes a deep breath and slides off the bed. This is the second meal he's hoodwinked her into, and probably won't be the last. "Fine. Fine. It's going to take me thirty minutes..._if_ that's fine with you."

He does not respond to her sarcasm, instead he walks over to the chair, scooping up the remote as he goes, and settles in with an ease that piques her ire. "Take as long as you want. The chef's paid for the night. Dinner will be served when we want it to be."

With little to go on and no desire to continue to ineffectually ask the man questions, Liz does her best to scoop up clothing that's passable for whatever it is he's got planned.

Reddington is tuning her out, watching something on an educational channel as she grabs a black sweater that with a hem low enough to disguise the band on the top of the black yoga pants. She even grabs a hanger, clips the pants to it, and hangs it in the bathroom to allow the steam from her shower to help get the few wrinkles out.

About halfway through making sure everything she'll need is in the bathroom so there won't be any self-conscious moving around the room in a towel after, she looks up at her reflection in the mirror and has to grimace; she's a fucking mess. Granted, she has every right in the world to look like a fucking mess in the privacy of her hotel room if she wants, but she knows she's been unknowingly toeing a line of obsession and she's actually fortunate the man is keeping an eye on her.

Liz lets out a deep breath, shoulders slumping with disgust. She should be able to take care of herself; she's not supposed to decompensate so much.

She's neglected the thin gauze and tape on the palm of her hand covering the cuts from the glass for the last day or so, and removing the adhesive takes more time than she expected. There's going to be a peppering of scarred dashes across her palm to accompany the older scarring on the heel of her hand and wrist when this is done.

Her shower is longer than it has to be; she'll admit to herself she's hiding out a bit. When the FBI agent decides her fingers have pruned enough, she doesn't have to spend too long dressing and blow drying her hair, now feeling nervous that she's left Raymond Reddington alone in her room with her timeline and Post-it note editorializing for too long.

Right now, she can't tell what she's going to find when she goes out there: the man who will offer his arm or the man who will hold her at arm's length.

Only ten minutes over the time she promised him, Lizzie swings open the door of the bathroom and steps out to find the room's been cleaned. The computer and her notes are mostly untouched. There isn't a single trace of her timeline on the wall, but the pages are stacked neatly on her bed..

He's sitting on the edge of the bed with his jacket on, settled in but obviously ready to go when she is.

"Thank you," she says, and gestures at the room when he shuts off the television to look over at her. "You didn't...you shouldn't have to clean up after me."

"Think nothing of it."

When her eyes fall on the Expo marker in his hand, he holds it up as she comes out, wiggling it.

"My tech web internet hacks came up with this. Not sure how it works but it opens hotel room doors and scares the bejeezus out of me."

...Which explains how he got in. He could have left it a mystery.

"As a Federal Agent, I don't think I should be seeing that then," she informs him, but there's a nervous attempt at humor underneath the warning.

He smiles as he stands, and it disappears quickly into a pocket.

She steals it back when he opens the lobby door for her and she brushes past on the way to the car, just because she can and she wants to remind him of it.

He doesn't ask for it back.

The drive isn't long at all, and they stick mostly to residential streets that wind around and then run along the edge of the beach. Large homes line the road but here and there there are walkways leading to the public beach behind them.

The houses get larger and more spaced out as he slows down. Ahead of them is woods, and the road turns suddenly to loop around towards the left, but Reddington pulls into the last house on the right. The gravel bounces loudly underneath the car and Liz glances up at the house before they come to a stop in the garage below the house.

The muted sage green and white-trimmed home is not his usual style of residence - the whole beach residential area isn't. It's similar to its neighbor, although it looks less lived-in. The rich-hued wood steps creak under their feet as they climb them to the front porch, adjacent to a wrap around porch.

"Just a small group of us," he informs her before opening the unlocked door.

The lack of security surprises her, but she realizes the perimeter of the property is probably being patrolled.

The door opens and the happy, high-pitched shriek of a child has Lizzie nearly jumping out of her skin.

"Relax," murmurs the man beside her, a hand at the small of her back and she doesn't immediately try to step away from it. "And no pen-stabbings, please...this is a house, not a hotel."

The house is palatial but a little dated in design, maybe 15 years or so. It's airy and furnished with comfortable furniture - family furniture. She smells turkey and something savory and her mouth waters.

Reddington gestures to help her with her coat, and it's just past her shoulders when Dembe comes around the corner to greet them with a smile.

"Agent Keen," he greets her.

"Dembe," she responds, feeling the small thread of anxiety in her gut grow; if Dembe is present, this is business.

He gives her a warm smile and there's another giggle somewhere down the hallway. He doesn't seem concerned by a child being present.

"Richard wants to know when he should prepare to serve," the taller man informs Reddington.

"Give us twenty?" he requests, and then gestures for her to precede him down the hall.

The hallway spills out into a dining room that then flows into the kitchen, where the aforementioned Richard is busily preparing dishes full of food. Continuing on after Reddington greats the chef and thanks him, they move into an informal den; there's a fireplace and massive LED tv.

Two little girls and the woman she can only assume is their mother from the way she's watching over their playtime are all dressed in similar shades of olive green. The mother looks up from fixing the wheel on a toy car to see who the newcomer is.

"Elizabeth, I'd like you to meet Aiza and her beautiful daughters - that's Nada and the little girl assisting a Ninja Turtle in his balancing act on the playhouse is Shiza. Dembe's sister and nieces always join us for Thanksgiving."

So she was wrong about the business part.

"Lovely to meet all of you," Liz says, to which Aiza flashes her a beautiful smile and replies 'Likewise', and then Red is signaling for her to continue past them to the two-story wall of glass windows that makes up the back wall of the room, looking out onto a patio above a small area of fenced off, patchy grass before a strip of stone landscaping separates the property from the empty, public beach.

Liz opens the door since she's ahead of him, and steps out into the chilly ocean breeze. There's the scraping sound of shoes pivoting that draws her attention to the right. Mr. Kaplan is standing beside an outdoor heating lamp, cigarette between two fingers.

"Thought I smelled your lack of patience," Reddington chirps as he moves past Liz to greet the bespectacled smoker. "You look well," he says before moving in for a hug.

"Same to you," Kaplan says, but looks over the man's shoulders at Liz with a critical eye. "You, on the other hand, look like shit."

Before she can say anything in response, the man between them laughs.

"I'll leave you two to catch up. Would either of you like something to drink?"

They both decline and Reddington excuses himself back into the house, looking far too amused with the situation.

Liz is left frozen in place for a moment, deliberating if she should go back inside to make her way through painfully awkward small talk or stay out on the porch with Mr. Kaplan, who she at least knows a little.

"It's warmer by the heater," the porch's other occupant says as she exhales smoke into the quick breeze.

Liz takes the few steps needed to bring her near the warmth and gives Kaplan a brief, appreciative smile with closed lips. She's not sure what she can ask or say - their only interaction before this involved disposing of the man Liz killed and then unsuccessfully searching for Raymond Reddington.

Mr. Kaplan looks Liz over from behind thick-framed glasses for the time span of another drag on the cigarette before saying "I don't think you looked this bad the last time I saw you."

"It's..I'm dealing with some things," Liz explains, hoping the subject will be dropped.

It isn't.

"And Raymond's helping you?" Something about the way the question is asked leaved Liz thinking the answer is already known.

Liz stuffs her hands farther down into her pockets and watches the surf. "I may have made a deal with the devil, yes," she decides to respond.

Kaplan gives her a long, hard look over those thick-framed glasses. "You met Aiza and her kids in there?"

She nods.

"The older one had a heart condition, needed surgery. There were legal channels to get her out of the country and to a specialist here in the States, but that would mean splitting the family up - not something anyone wanted. Dembe didn't even know Raymond's plans until it was done, and his sister called from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and asked if he'd come and see his niece before her operation.

"Raymond got clipped by a bullet in the process of getting them out of the country. Look close at Red the next time you're near him - he's got a scar on the back of his head from the graze."

Elizabeth doesn't make eye contact as she tries to not only absorb this new piece of easily given, private information, but what the professional cleaner is trying to achieve by regaling her with it.

She squares her shoulders before responding. "He's loyal to those he considers his friends - I know I'm considered one of those, somehow, if I'm here today. I know I shouldn't take that for granted...although I won't be guilted into feeling appreciative for it. I would never ask him to take a bullet for me," she adds, after a second of thought "Half the time he's the reason they're being aimed at me."

Kaplan's laugh is a scratchy, raw thing from little use and cigarettes. "Dearie, you really _are_ still recovering from your tussle with your husband, aren't you? You're correct about his loyalty to his friends...but as for what he did for Dembe? The man is family to him. His brother. Raymond was nearly killed trying to look after the people his brother loved."

Kaplan's pointy chin jerks in the direction of the doors. "You and I are huddling outside to avoid small talk before _family_ dinner. Dembe is going to sit at his right, and I bet you can guess where your seat will be."

"Where I choose to sit."

The answer isn't what Kaplan was expecting, but it's received with surprised pleasure. "Good answer."

The smoker is about to say something else to the FBI agent when the door opens and Dembe tells them it's time to eat.

Mr. Kaplan squats down to pick up the ashtray sitting next to the leg of a patio chair and waits for the door to close again before continuing. "As much as he cares about Dembe, that bullet graze was an accident.

"I know him. I've seen what he's like with you. For you, Raymond would not only take a bullet, he'd probably be the one to pull the trigger. I don't know _what_ you are to him, but it's significant. In our line of work, there aren't a lot of good people - he's the closest thing we've got to good. We need a little good sometimes."

And then Kaplan is walking past Liz and into the house.

She follows only a few seconds after, and the smells from the kitchen before are even stronger. The dining room table is weighed down with magazine-perfect bowls of food. As predicted, Dembe is sitting to Reddington's right, with his sister next to him. The two children take the last seat on the one side, as well as the end seat. Of the three seats on the other side of the table, Mr. Kaplan has taken the middle one, leaving Liz to make the decision between sitting next to Nada or Red.

She takes the seat next to the host.

Despite Richard's obvious presence for hours of preparation, Reddington insists on carving the turkey. There's the clink and scrape of china and wood as food is passed around and served. Conversation is mostly praise over the food, and it's light.

The two girls are well-mannered and cheerful, and Liz asks them the standard questions adult ask children; they're young enough that they don't see monotony in her queries regarding their favorite colors and favorite characters. They adore their uncle, that much is certain, and she appreciates getting to see this other side of the mostly silent bodyguard, particularly when he gets up at one point to help cut food up for Shiza and has the little girl hold the utensils under his hands to practice at it.

Liz says something at one point that has the man seated beside her at the head of the table breaking into genuine, healthy laughter, and something about the moment causes her to realize where she is, who she is with, and what they're all doing.

It doesn't go unnoticed.

"You look like Alice at the tea party," Mr. Kaplan declares quietly from her other side.

She shakes her head as she chews before finally answering, keeping her voice down so he wouldn't hear their conversation. "He might be a mad hatter but no, no this is just...it's just so normal."

Kaplan's eyebrows rise quickly. "What did you think would happen when you came tonight?"

Liz doesn't answer, because she's not exactly sure _what_ she thought would take place, but a picture-perfect family-style Thanksgiving dinner was not what she expected. She initially anticipated dinner for two, somewhere lavish, someplace an owner would come out and shake Red's-

That's where she was clearly wrong. Raymond Reddington is not actually 'Red'. This is private and personal and yes, she's been allowed an incredible glimpse into the man actually living under layers of tailored clothing and theatrical airs.

She finds herself watching him as the meal continues - they all seem to have come to an unspoken decision to try to really make a dent in the incredible amount of food on the table. Richard joins them halfway through eating and takes the free seat at Reddington's invitation.

Thanksgiving dinners for the Scott family were usually loud and boisterous and shared with their patchwork family, taking place in cigarette smoke-addled and cramped old homes, the kind with screech-groaning screen doors that slapped shut behind you when you came in from playing in the dirt driveway, and shag carpets in muddy browns that didn't match the wood paneled walls. There was never a kids table, but there was always a football game on after dinner, and it wasn't always a turkey. Some years it was Chinese. Others, it was pizza.

But there was a warmth there, a kind of pleasant intimacy, and Liz feels it here as well.

When the last napkin is thrown on the table in surrender, Richard announces dessert will be served in an hour. The chef and the host set about gathering plates and refusing help, leaving the others to distract themselves with the short time before they will be settling into their chairs once again.

Warmed by the food and the half-glass of wine she's consumed, Liz grabs her jacket and wanders out to the back porch once more, taking a seat in one of the wicker chairs close to the heat lamp.

There's always been something hypnotic about the ocean for her - and it's strange, because it's not like it was a part of her life growing up. Maybe it's the novelty.

Elizabeth feels like her mind is clear out here; she can think better. She tries to think pragmatically about Tom Keen and who would have sent him into the life of a woman like her. They met while she was still in New York, and while she had ambitions to go further, her future in the FBI was still uncertain.

Whatever it was, it was a long play. She recognized now what all of those attempts to take her on vacation where: an easy way to gain him those crucial first 48 hours to get her wherever he wanted her without anyone really missing her.

His plan must have changed though; she couldn't see how killing the Admiral and getting caught would help deliver her to whoever was looking for her.

Was it her biological father, trying to maneuver her away from Red's grasp?

"You were born in a town like this," her host declares to announce his presence and she jolts in her seat. Liz doesn't bother turning to look at him or acknowledge him; if he's leading with a line like that, he's interested in talking, getting her invested in the conversation with the promise of more little clues about her life, the debris of a mystery that has already been solved, in a way. "On the edge of the ocean. A little town...I think it stays with a person, in a way. It's hard for people like that to find the same sense of calm elsewhere."

"Speaking from personal experience?" she asks, her voice half-muffled by the arm of the chair she has been using as a headrest, already anticipating a vague half-truth as an answer as she hears the sounds of him settling into the wicker seat next to hers, inches away from her head. She recalls Massachusetts on a birth certificate in his files.

"Navy for a reason, Liz."

And that's it. He says nothing else. There's just the wind and the waves and the seagulls keening and their quiet breathing and Liz feels herself nodding off.

The jacket being adjusted on her shoulder wakes her up. Raymond Reddington is leaning over the side of his chair, reaching along her back to grab at the edge of her jacket sliding off of her. She can smell his cologne - she can't identify it, but she has to keep herself from inhaling. There is a split second of hesitation on his part when he notices that she's awake and staring up at him, but then he continues the action.

"It's cold, perhaps we should move back inside," he suggests, looking out at the water and not at her.

It gives her a moment to regard his profile. There's the scar, a small spot of scarring on the back of his head, disrupting his closely buzzed hair.

She's not sitting on the porch beside Red, the Concierge of Crime. She's sitting next to Raymond Reddington - she's having dinner as a part of Raymond Reddington's family.

"This is...this has probably been the nicest Thanksgiving I've had in a while," she says, and he turns to her with a smile.

Whatever he starts to say, he thinks better of it, instead saying "Let's go check on dessert."

After a slice of the most delicious apple pie she's ever eaten, Mr. Kaplan and Richard say their goodbyes. Liz argues her host into allowing her to help clear the table and they move quietly around one another and the kitchen while Dembe and Aiza corral the two girls upstairs for baths.

It's all strangely domestic.

He catches her looking at the clock as she wipes her hands on a dish towel.

"It is late. Take one of the guest rooms if you'd like, get some sleep."

She actually takes him up on the offer and finds herself crawling fully dressed into a bed with expensive sheets in a sparsely decorated room upstairs. Her work phone has a couple messages from Aram and Meera wishing her a happy holiday and she answers them before turning in. She sleeps soundly for a short time before finding herself staring at the ceiling. After ten minutes goes by and it's obvious she's not falling back to sleep, Liz throws back the blankets and pads downstairs.

Wine. Wine will definitely help.

She was informed about the guards patrolling the perimeter unseen, but she still feels anxious about walking around this foreign, silent house in the middle of the night.

She grabs one of the drying wine glasses and the bottle of red that was opened earlier and pours herself a healthy glass. It's halfway to her lips when she hears noise nearby.

Her gun is back in the hotel room - she wasn't in the right frame of mind to have it with her earlier and Reddington assured her it would be safe there, that there would still be surveillance.

She grabs a knife out of the block as her heart rate speeds up.

The sound leads her to the back hallway, into the owner's suite. It's halfway down the length of the carpeting that she realizes her wine glass is still in her hand, so she puts it down carefully on the floor, and proceeds. Liz adjusts her grip on the knife and moves forward, scanning the darkened bedroom.

She doesn't anticipate the sight before her: Raymond Reddington is kneeling on a large throw pillow in front of a low-mounted in-wall safe. The dim light filtering through the window across the room casts strokes of silver highlights on small areas of him as he works at the dial.

There's no sense of urgency to his movements; that, combined with the fact that her approach - which she's certain he must have heard - has not caused him to react, has her flipping the hallway light on with her elbow.

Light spills into a neat square, and she now sees the man is wearing pajama pants and a sweatshirt, his feet bare. It's difficult to place him as the man who strolled into FBI Headquarters and put himself in a similar position to be apprehended, and yet this isn't the strangest thing she's seen and part of her is wondering just how far down the rabbit hole she's fallen.

He exhales loudly, turning towards her with a nettled expression.

"Which one were you going to offer whoever was back here?" is his rhetorical question combined with a jut of his chin in the direction of her wine before turning back to his work. "Have a little faith in the security detail, Lizzie."

She doesn't respond. The knife is put to rest on a shelf just inside the doorway, and she doubles back to retrieve her glass. She leans against the doorframe and watches his progress for a time, too tired to try to make conversation.

There's a beer bottle by Red's knee, and he occasionally pauses to steal another sip from it. There's a quiet punctuated by sips and liquid on glass and breathing and Red humming under his breath - Cat Stevens, she recognizes, the one about singing out and being free.

"Took you for a classical music and jazz person," she tells him over the rim of her glass.

"Jazz, a little. Classical music is elevator, dentist crap...What made you think that?" he asks, leaning back to take another sip and then he raises an eyebrow. "The hat?"

"The hat," she affirms. "The clothes...that's all part of it, isn't it?"

He doesn't answer, instead turning back to the safe.

"What's in there?" Liz asks.

"Not a clue," he happily answers. "Owners left in a rush when they realized the IRS was on to them for tax evasion, so who knows what goodies got left behind for bored, insomniac crooks to find in the middle of the night."

He'd said it was his house earlier. Not to her, of course, but to Dembe's sister.

He doesn't lie to her, isn't that what he's always telling her?

Clothes and music and houses that aren't his own preference. Clothes and music and houses that all fit a character, the one written for him by the same people who now print his face and info on a Most Wanted poster.

"So you _don't_ own this place...you don't own any of them do you?"

"So many questions," he mutters, but makes no effort to answer her. He refocuses on the safe and seems to seriously try to open it now; he's trying to go by feel. He shifts and turns in just the right way, holding himself in position and she feels a tightness in her chest.

"My Dad taught me to do it that way," she says.

"Your Dad taught me to do it that way, too," he responds easily. "Which is exactly why I hire someone to do it if the job requires it, or I pop the sucker out whole and take it to go so I can twist the knob in private. Police response is too quick nowadays and this is timely."

"Daddy considered that cheating." She realizes the slip of her wine-loosened tongue after, but the man before her doesn't say anything.

"He was a crook with ethics. That's how he ended up in prison in the first place."

It's said so quickly, she can't imagine he thought it through, but it pricks her curiosity.

"Don't you dare drop it at that," Liz warns him, standing up straight. "The man never served time while I was with him; what happened?"

Giving up on the safe, at least for the time being, Reddington twists around to address her. "Sam took the fall for a job gone wrong, but some former accomplice who turned state evidence named him in a more serious case and brought him to the Fed's attention. When they realized I couldn't just play dress up and play house in expensive homes and give criminals faulty information to get them caught, that I'd have to start getting my hands dirty if I wanted to keep my cover, they told Sam his sentence would be reduced if he would teach me." He goes back to working on the safe as an obvious way of avoiding looking at her after he realizes just how much he's told her, finishing by saying, "He saved my ass more times than I could count."

"That why yo-"

She stops when she hears the click, and they both immediately look at the metal door on the safe. Reddington swings it open.

It's empty.

They both stare at the space inside the safe and he finally breaks the silence when he sighs.

She watches the drop of his shoulders before she hears his dry, humorless chuckle. "Well, that's life, isn't it?"

He's said he is still looking for his truth, and she knows he's referring to his daughter; this is more than just a safe to him.

He doesn't move for so long, just staring at the shadows before him, that it worries her.

"It's just a safe," she says, but gets no answer. She repeats herself with no success.

Concern increasing in her, Liz takes a small step forward and puts a hand on his shoulder. "Re-Raymond," she tries, while shaking his shoulder. He jolts, twisting around to look up at her. "It doesn't mean anything," she says firmly looking him in the eye. "It's just a safe. Come on."

Maybe it's the hour, or the wine - she likes to have them as excuses, instead of some sense of compassion for him, although the part that has been rallying against admitting to it is fading - she reaches her hand out to help him stand and doesn't immediately let go when they're at eye level.

Wordlessly, he follows her into the kitchen where she washes out her glass by hand and puts it back where it was originally resting on the drying rack. She feels and hears him walk behind her, empty glass being placed on the island counter, before he is passing through to the dining room and then the den.

His silence is unnerving. There's a anxious hum between them.

She could easily walk back upstairs, and they could both act like this hasn't happened. She could, but doesn't want to. Liz resists the urge to hide her hands in the sleeves of her sweater, settling for wrapping her arms around her middle as she steps closer to him.

He's sitting on the couch in the dark, a doll in his hands as he surveys the evidence of children before him.

She doesn't join him, instead choosing to perch on the armrest of the angled armchair to face him.

Today has been a break, a welcome one, from the chaos going on around them. She thought it was the same for him, but seeing that he's reliving memories of his daughter, that he chooses to do this every year, makes her chest hurt.

This time next year, the next time he does this, Nada will be 8. She'll be a whole two years older than Raymond Reddington's daughter ever was in his time with her.

"Why do you do this to yourself," she asks him quietly, "have them join you every year, if it hurts you so much?"

The man on the couch doesn't answer, but she hears the quick intake of breath, like she's quickly pulled off a bandaid. The dark makes it hard to see his face, and she wishes he wasn't sitting with his back to the windows, so she could see his expression.

"They're not my daughter," he says. It's hard to tell if he's reminding himself, or trying to assure her he knows it until he adds, "I know I'm not their father."

Liz bites her lip and tries to form her next words carefully. "A person can...sometimes you can try to fill a role, or ask somebody to fill one in different ways. Sometimes you just want to imagine what it would be like. Sometimes people aren't even aware of it."

She shouldn't say it, but she chooses to, feeling dumb or brave or maybe fed up. "It's what I tell myself when I get frustrated with your hot-and-cold routine with me."

He's very still. She can feel him watching her.

"This coming from a woman who asked me if I was her father," he says darkly.

He's never understood why she asked it, and she's only just understanding herself. She was trying to understand why a near stranger would be willing to risk his life for her. There are times when it seems he's not even sure how he views her and she's just been trying to seek some clarification, for both of them.

For a man who likes to act like he knows everything, she's not sure he even knows his own feelings.

If Liz stays downstairs, if she settles in for it, they could have a long, loud conversation about this, but she doesn't want to go there tonight.

She takes a controlled breath before she stands and responds, and she throws it over her shoulder as she exits because she's not brave enough, not right now, to stay to see what his reaction will be.

"Maybe I hoped you didn't think of _me_ that way."


End file.
